


The Way A Knife Loves A Heart

by Linpatootie



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: (which is to say really really not that fluffy at all), Hannibal is a great big scary creeper, Hannigram - Freeform, M/M, Will isn't necessarily right in the head either, about as fluffy as you can get with a cannibal, graphic description of violent fantasies, graphic descriptions of murder scenes, it's a mess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-03
Updated: 2013-06-18
Packaged: 2017-12-13 21:19:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 23,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/828998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Linpatootie/pseuds/Linpatootie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will Graham is unprecedented in Hannibal Lecter’s life and he falls for him with a kind of messy violence. This doesn’t bode too well for our Will, but he may not object to it as much as one might expect.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Как нож любит сердце](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2596322) by [Streichholz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Streichholz/pseuds/Streichholz)



> I shamelessly stole the title from A Softer World: 709. ‘I love you the way a knife loves a heart, the way a bomb loves a crowd, the way your mother warned you about, essentially’. All credit for those lovely words goes to E. Horne and J. Comeau.  
> I would also like to thank Luna and Janneke for being fabulous and helping me get my grammar and my bullshit together and for allowing me to flail at them about how much feelings I have about murderous creeps.

It starts in the dark, like everything worth his attention has the tendency to. There’s no knock, no doorbell. There’s silence, complete and utter, but Hannibal wakes up because someone is at his door regardless. He’d quip about honed serial killer senses, but the house is empty and he’s not quite insane enough to start making jokes to himself yet.

Not that he generally expects company at two in the morning but Will Graham is a bit of a surprise. He stands, bare-footed, on his welcome mat, in a white t-shirt and a pair of boxers. He stares vacantly into Hannibal’s house and gives no reaction to Hannibal opening the door at all. For a bewildering moment Hannibal wonders if Will sleepwalked fifty miles to his house before he remembers the murders in Keswick that Jack had called Will in on and the cheap motel he’d been forced to stay at. Still, that left Will with at least four miles to wander to Hannibal’s home, which lingers somewhere between extraordinary and worrying. 

(The body in Keswick, by the way, had for a change not been put there by Hannibal even if he had to admit he admired the killer’s handiwork. Three separate victims, all their organs removed and placed back in a delightful mix and match? An utterly _inspired_ sort of puzzle.)

“Will?” 

Absolutely nothing. The night chill curls past Hannibal into his house, and Will is pale, goose-fleshed, and rather spectacularly underdressed for the time of year.  
“You’re freezing. Come inside,” he says, taking Will gently by the upper arm and steering him in through the door. Will obediently complies, wakefulness appearing at the very edges of him but never quite taking hold. He’s not awake, but he’s not asleep. He blinks, purses his lips and sort of… puffs at him.

Hannibal has been a psychiatrist for a long time, but he’s never gotten that response before. He’s a touch endeared by it. Then, Will could probably swear at him like a sailor and a part of Hannibal would still find it touching. Will Graham does this to him. For the first time in a long time Hannibal finds himself wishing to keep someone with him in a gilded little cage and Will doesn’t even realize this, which for some odd reason only makes Hannibal want to sidle in closer. 

He takes his housecoat off and wraps it around Will’s shoulders. Will sways just a touch, blinking slowly. Hannibal tries not to think about the implications of Will’s current state, reminding himself that psychoanalyzing someone who showed up in their underwear is probably rude but knows very well this doesn’t bode well for Will at all. If this were anyone other than Will, he’d probably cite this as the reason to have them institutionalized for a while. For observation, at the very least. But this is Will, and having him safely locked away in a nice, expensive psychiatric institute where Hannibal can’t get to him doesn’t meet his ends at all. 

Guiding him carefully through his house Hannibal considers his guestroom, not made up to his satisfaction right now but unquestionably more appropriate. He decides against it. If asked he could simply state that 2 AM is surely no time to have to make up a bed for an unexpected guest, especially not one on the verge of hypothermia, but the truth of it is that the opportunity to see Will in his bed is one he will not turn away from. 

It’s not necessarily a sexually motivated desire (Hannibal’s so rarely are) but certainly a possessive one. Will Graham in his bed, where he was sleeping himself just twenty minutes ago, where his pillow still carries the imprint of his head and the sheets might even still be warm with his presence. He imagines his scent might cling to Will, transferred from his sheets onto Will’s skin. It’s an inordinately intimate prospect that sends a cascade of shivers down Hannibal’s shoulders which he relishes for a moment.

He sits Will down on the edge of his bed. Will frowns, shudders, and licks his lips. “Where am I?” he says, and Hannibal wonders how to answer that question since Will seems to be somewhere Hannibal can’t follow him. He stares beyond Hannibal, his eyes following something that’s not actually there with open concern.  
“My bedroom,” Hannibal says calmly. He doesn’t even know where he finds all this patience sometimes. “My house. You sleepwalked here. Quite some determination, Will. It must have taken you at least an hour and a half if not more.”

Will’s feet are blacker than the grave. Mud, grit, and possibly even blood – Baltimore asphalt is not kind to bare feet, and those grubby soles would not be kind to Hannibal’s pristine sheets. He retrieves some things from his bathroom, half wondering if Will might have somehow disappeared out the window before he comes back. He hasn’t, he’s still sitting there, looking dazed if slightly more awake and frowning at the red numbers on his alarm clock.

“You have a digital alarm clock.”  
“Yes, I do. This surprises you?”  
“You own a harpsichord. Of course a digital alarm clock would surprise me.”  
Hannibal smiles, kneels in front of him and takes one of Will’s feet in his hands.  
“What’re you doing?” Will says, sounding wary if oddly amused.  
“You just walked over four miles on your bare feet.”  
“No I didn’t.”  
“Unless you took a bus in your sleep, which I would find immensely impressive, I’m afraid you did.” He cleans Will’s feet, one by one, takes in the small abrasions, scrapes, things that will itch more than they’ll hurt. He’ll need to disinfect them regardless. Infections on the soles of his feet would bring Will far more discomfort than Hannibal would wish upon him.

“This will sting,” he warns, and Will winces beautifully and hisses in a way that sends little thrills down Hannibal’s teeth. Pinpricks of blood reappear on Will’s raw skin and Hannibal is transfixed for a moment. He feels silly about it – he is, after all, not a vampire – but it works like a little tease that leaves him wanting more. Hannibal the great white shark, smelling blood in the water and gearing up for carnage. 

He looks up, sitting on his knees in front of Will, who ought to be fully awake now but still seems to be questioning it. He sits like a confused little duck amidst Hannibal’s expensive sheets and Hannibal is reminded sharply of a Botticelli angel. He could pose him like that, Hannibal thinks, finish him as the true work of art he was intended to be. Shave his jaw smooth, style his hair just so. Death, he imagines, would wipe the weariness from Will’s face, and he would leave him with his eyes open so he could see the beauty of real pain forever captured in them. He might suspend him in a church or some other sacred place, surrounded by holy things that would pale in comparison to him. Wrapped artfully in cloth, palms up for absolution, and wings made of knives thrust into his back. 

It’s one of those images Hannibal probably ought to write down, lest he forget them. It is, after all, a beautiful idea, and he vibrates with the intensity with which it presents itself to his mind’s eye.  
“I don’t know how I got here,” Will says into the room as Hannibal goes to put his things back into the bathroom. Hannibal doesn’t answer, his imaginary tableau still vivid in his heart.  
“I was dreaming. I think. I might still be. It’s cold in here,” Will continues in a way that implies it doesn’t even really matter if Hannibal is in the room to hear him speak. 

He simply tucks him into bed like a child, Will remaining pliant and obedient under his authoritative hands.  
“I really do hope I’m dreaming this,” Will mumbles as Hannibal pulls the sheets up to his chin. “Otherwise this might be the weirdest night of my life.”  
“As long as it doesn’t qualify as one of your nightmares, I think that might actually hurt my feelings. I happen to think myself a fine nurse,” Hannibal quips and Will chuckles.  
“My therapist just washed my feet and is tucking me into his bed. I have no idea how that qualifies.”  
“Just get some rest, Will. My doors are locked, you cannot wander out.”

The statement ought to be terrifying, Hannibal thinks, or at least it was for anyone who Hannibal had locked effortlessly into his domain before Will, but Will seems to settle within his skin and relax at his words. If nothing can get out then nothing can get in, and Will, after all, doesn’t know the monster from his nightmare has been locked right in with him. Not yet. 

Sleep comes back to Will easily – has it ever left? – and his eyelids droop as he looks up at Hannibal. He looks like a little boy, despite the unshaven jaw and the bags under his eyes. Hannibal thinks it might be the mess of soft curls on his head, or perhaps the naked vulnerability in his eyes. He could kill him so easily like this. He doubts Will would even fight back if he wrapped his hands around his neck and just pressed. He pictures it, the veins bulging on Will’s temples, his skin reddening, imagines the thrum of his heartbeat under his fingers, the final puff of air escaping from between Will’s lips. Would he panic? Or would he simply keep staring into Hannibal’s eyes like he didn’t believe any of this was really happening?

Will closes his eyes, swallows, and smiles. He’s about to say something, the words already between his teeth, but something very well-constructed breaks inside of Hannibal and he kisses him. Just like that, really, leans in and kisses those parted lips and wonders what the last time was he surrendered control in this manner. 

He feels the moment of surprise in Will, experiences it in a minute twitch of his jaw, the flutter of his eyelashes across Hannibal’s cheekbone, but gives in as easily as Hannibal had imagined he might do to a more deadly assault and becomes remarkably cooperative. There’s not a lot to the kiss, it’s a brief moment of lips and just a small promise of teeth and tongue and the scratch of Will’s beard, but Hannibal wants so badly his hands tremble with it. He balls them into fists beside Will’s head, the fabric of his pillow case between his fingers, and pulls back.  
Will is blushing. Hannibal feels hungry, like he’s a predator just coming out of hibernation and his stomach is bottomless and empty. 

“Go to sleep,” Hannibal says, softly. He presses a kiss to Will’s forehead, an afterthought of unanticipated affection, and can smell Will’s shampoo and the intimate scent of his scalp.  
“Okay,” Will says nonsensically, and Hannibal chuckles to himself as he leaves his bedroom, closes the door, and pads down his dark hallway on bare feet. He retrieves a spare pillow and a blanket from his linen closet and settles on his sofa, not bothering to turn on the lights anywhere he goes. He lies on his back and stares at his living room ceiling and wonders if he would bleed were he to cut himself on the sharp edges of Will’s jagged heart. 

***

Hannibal is an early riser on most days but even more so after spending a few estranging hours on his sofa. It’s comfortable, of course it is, but the night was not just an odd one for Will and he feels restless. As such he’s up, dressed and nearly done preparing breakfast when Will hesitantly sidles into his kitchen, still wearing Hannibal’s housecoat over his admittedly scant nightwear. 

“Morning,” he says, the embarrassment surrounding him telling Hannibal entire stories.  
“Good morning Will. I was just about to rouse you. Breakfast is almost ready.” He pushes a glass of coffee across the counter towards Will who accepts it and drinks without looking at Hannibal. Hannibal scoops his carefully prepared eggs onto a hot plate.  
“What are we eating?”  
“Scrambled eggs with chicken, mushrooms and tomato. I thought you could use a proper breakfast after your eventful night.” 

“Right,” Will grumbles as he follows Hannibal into his dining room. He walks with a kind of careful hesitation, his feet still causing him discomfort, and looks relieved to be able to sit down. Hannibal has already set the table, complete with a pitcher of fresh orange juice and a modest table piece in the center.  
“Do you always eat breakfast like you’re a member of the royal family?” Will asks, frowning at the white lily perched preciously amidst carefully selected pieces of fruit.  
“Not quite. I merely enjoy pampering my guests, even those who show up unannounced past midnight in their underwear.”  
Will snorts out a laugh and drinks his coffee with some obvious amusement and Hannibal hopes this fractures the awkwardness Will carried into the morning with him.

He watches as Will tentatively digs into his breakfast, stabbing bits of chicken with his fork. He can’t describe the thrill he feels when Will puts it in his mouth, chews it, when quiet enjoyment slides over his face as he swallows. It’s difficult to classify what Hannibal enjoys more – feeding others his cooking, or eating it himself. It’s rather a toss-up, although when it comes to Will the scales might be tipping into a more obvious direction. He’d call it one of life’s smaller pleasures, but doubts the software engineer he’s now calling “chicken” would agree.

“I didn’t remember where I was when I woke up,” Will says after a few thoughtful bites. “It took me a moment to realize I was in your house. I don’t remember a thing about last night.”  
“Nothing?” Hannibal inquires, with a pang of something he ignores.  
“Bits and pieces, but I don’t know which ones are real and which ones I dreamed up.” He frowns at his plate, scooting a slice of mushroom back and forth before picking it up and putting it in his mouth.

Again a pang of something, although this time it feels fairly close to relief. Hannibal understands that his highly unprofessional conduct might have lost him Will as a patient, and, by extension, as a friend. If Will can convince himself it was a hallucination it might be better suited to Hannibal’s purposes in the end. Still, he yearns to wander through Will’s thought process, untangle those knots, and immerse himself in the confusion. If he does categorize the kiss as a hallucination, was it one that frightened him? Would he worry about the meaning of his overworked brain cooking something like that up? Had he, perhaps, hallucinated about Hannibal before? Curiosity snaps at Hannibal’s ankles and it’s a most frustrating sort of little parasite. 

“I don’t have a thing on me, not even a pair of shoes. I hope Jack didn’t try to call me,” Will says, going back to frowning at the centerpiece as if it was personally responsible for his lack of pants.  
“I’ll drive you to your hotel so you can get your things, don’t worry. Also, if you prefer, you can call Jack from my phone to check in.”  
“Not sure I want to call Jack from your house in the early hours of the morning. I don’t know if I care to explain away the jumps Jack’s mind is sure to make at that one.” He grimaces, and Hannibal smiles.  
“Let him make jumps for once, as he’s usually the one holding the hoops in front of you.”  
Will makes a delightful face around a mouthful of juice, and Hannibal chews his breakfast triumphantly.


	2. Chapter 2

Will solves the Keswick murders. Of course he does, and Hannibal is proud of him for that. _Look how well my puppet dances_ , he thinks to himself, _and look how blind he is to what the strings I play him with are made of_. Will returns to Wolf Trap to his little pack and his little house, and Hannibal advises him to get some extra locks on his doors. It would be a touch overdramatic if he actually were to try and cross those fifty miles in his sleep, after all.

He worries for a while that even if Will has convinced himself nothing happened the indistinct memory will still cause him to keep a distance. But only a while, yes, as Will has an appointment with him barely a week later and doesn’t cancel. He even shows up early, sits quietly in Hannibal’s waiting room while Hannibal finishes his session with a young widow who just can’t manage to accept her husband’s death. She emerges from Hannibal’s office still sobbing, and Will is visibly uncomfortable with this. As such, he calls him into his office earlier than he usually would, still clearing away his previous patient’s file.

“That looked tough,” Will comments gruffly, standing awkwardly with his hands in his pockets.  
“This room has seen worse emotional breakdowns. Please, sit.”

They do, and they chat. That’s really all there’s to it – they discuss the case, Will’s teaching, even the weather after Will mentions getting caught in a hailstorm while walking his dogs. Hannibal just lets the conversation flow, allows Will to settle in and forget the unexpected confrontation with a stranger’s grief before he takes his jab.

“Do we need to talk about your little nocturnal adventure last week?”  
“Didn’t we already discuss that over breakfast?”  
“As friends, yes. Not as doctor and patient.”  
Will grimaces.

“As sleepwalking goes, walking as far as you did is extreme, Will. I expect you disassociated more than you actually sleepwalked,” Hannibal continues.  
“I don’t know. Maybe. I know I dreamed most of my way through it. The whole experience was just one big hallucination that left me with sore feet and a cold.”  
“Have you experienced it again after?”  
“Not the past week, no.” He takes his glasses off, hooks one of the legs into his shirt collar to keep it there and rubs a hand over his face. “I can’t believe I sleepwalked to your house, though. I’m amazed I even knew how to get there from the hotel.”

Hannibal can’t stop a little smile at that, just a touch of pride. It seems an accomplishment, somehow. “I am a source of stability and security in your life. It is not strange to imagine why your sleep-addled mind would drive you to me. You were subconsciously seeking out protection.”  
Will’s face darkens, the idea clearly not as flattering to him as it is to Hannibal. “Like some troubled kind of homing pigeon straight to your front door. My subconscious is not a creature of subtlety. Then again the images it conjures up should have clued me into that.”

Ah, there it is. The question still attached to Hannibal’s mind like a leech, the intricately delicate matter of the kiss that Will convinced himself never was. Hannibal is accustomed to lies. He lies every moment of every day, to everyone he meets, in every situation he finds himself. He lies about who he is, what he does, and why he does it. He lies about where he’s going and where he’s been. Every breath, every word, every smile, every carefully composed inch of his outward appearance is make-believe and he’s been doing it for so long that it’s become him. He can’t even really remember which parts of him are real and which ones aren’t, except for those quiet times when he’s stickywarm with someone else’s blood and oh, yes, _there_ he is. 

This does make it surprisingly easy to carry on life playing make-believe with Will’s hallucinations, Hannibal’s assurances as unreliable as the images conjured up by his mind. It thrills Hannibal a bit, actually - _what else might I make him think isn’t real?_ \- and he plucks at the strings leading from Will’s limbs to Hannibal’s fingers. 

“Tell me about your dreams.”  
“My dreams.”  
“Hallucinations. The images your subconscious conjures up. Whatever you wish to refer to them as.”  
Will sighs, puts his elbows on his knees, looks away with a sardonic smile. “Waking nightmares, is what they are. Disturbingly well-styled horrors. Many a movie director would be jealous of the images my brain manages to come up with. Maybe I should consider a career as a set designer.”  
Hannibal quirks the corner of his mouth up. “Describe one to me.”  
Will just sighs again, sits back, struggles with the whole thing but, surprisingly, does do it without objection. Hannibal had actually expected him to either refuse or deflect. It speaks volumes of Will’s trust in him that he simply complies. “There’s a… a stag. It’s big, bigger than an actual stag, and it has black feathers. I hear hoof beats everywhere I go.” He chuckles wryly, turning his eyes to the ceiling. “God, I sound like a raving lunatic.”

“No, you don’t. Trust me, I’ve had plenty of lunatics rave at me before. It’s not difficult to ascertain the source of this hallucination though, is it?”  
“Gareth Jacob Hobbs’ cabin of horrors. I know, I know. It just… I suppose it stuck. It’s always there.”  
“You were traumatized by the events surrounding the Minnesota Shrike. This has manifested itself in your mind as an actual monster. This is not unusual, Will.”  
“Yeah, good to know I fit the norm.”  
“Does it frighten you?”  
“I’m terrified of it.” The words leave Will’s mouth quickly, as if they’ve been stuck under his tongue for a long time. His eyes glaze over as he turns oddly inwards.  
“It’s not real. It’s a figment of your imagination,” Hannibal says.  
“It feels real. When it’s there, I can even smell it. Blood and dirt and something like wet leaves. I can feel its breath on my skin.”

If Will’s hallucinations are this involved it is no wonder he mistook the kiss to be one. He observes him and Will becomes visibly uneasy under his gaze, clearly wondering if Hannibal is rethinking his earlier raving lunatic observation.  
“Is there a way to make them stop?” he asks, eyes now flickering to the floor. He’s looking everywhere except at Hannibal, and just to push him a little bit Hannibal keeps his own eyes trained very firmly on Will.  
“There are certain medications.”  
“Is there a way to make them stop _without_ pills?”  
“You might try avoiding crime scenes,” he says after a deep breath, already anticipating the response he’s going to get.

“We’ve had that discussion before, I can’t.”  
“You won’t. There’s a difference. All the therapy in the world is not going to help you if you keep exposing yourself to damaging influences.”  
“Then I’ll just have to learn to live with the murder stag,” Will says bitingly. “And your therapy does help, so we’ll just keep at it and hope for the best.” He says those last words as if they were an insult of some kind, baring his teeth at them.  
“That’s nice to hear, Will, thank you,” Hannibal says in response, watches Will trip over his own intentions and realize what he’d said. “I must admit it was flattering to be the one your subconscious chose to go to in your moment of unrest.” He’s pushing it, he knows he is, but he can’t help himself. Sharp little pokes, the point of a dull knife into the tender pink flesh of Will’s underbelly. “You should not feel embarrassed by it. Whenever you feel uneasy, I will always be there to protect you. It is important to remember this.” _Yes_ , he thinks to himself, _give me your trust so I can make us supper_. 

He pictures a world where Will doesn’t rely on anyone but him and desires it so strongly that it nearly breaks out of him. He wants to carve his initials into Will’s face. Property of Hannibal Lecter. Property of the Chesapeake Ripper. There is a scalpel on his desk and he has to actively keep himself from retrieving it. No matter how much he enjoys the mental image of Will letting him do it, sitting still in his chair, staring up at him with some odd devotion while his own blood trickles into his eyes, the reality would be a lot less romantic. He conjures a kind smile onto his face. “I care deeply for you, after all.”

Will blushes sharply, looking to his left, and Hannibal knows exactly what he’s thinking. Whatever sort of dream Will has made himself believe the kiss was, a nightmare it was not. Hannibal is so deeply fond of Will in that moment he fancies he might wear him as a suit.


	3. Chapter 3

Hannibal wanders into corners of his mind that others might keep dark, but which he keeps brightly lit. He tends to them with obvious affection, fills them with delightful memories, hopes, and dreams. In them he pictures Will up against bright white walls, naked, spread-eagled, upside down. A dark liquid drips down him which might be blood, might be wine, and Hannibal wants to suck it off Will’s sickly skin. He vibrates with the need for it, even when he sits across his office from his unknowing prey and pretends he doesn’t.

He kills a dentist in Middle River and leaves him upside down in his own chair, his chest opened up and several kinds of dentistry instruments artistically stuck into his lungs. He takes his liver with him and makes an excellent pate. Jack has Will reconstruct the crime and afterwards Will sits and trembles on Hannibal’s sofa and tells him with eerie precision what acts he had performed on the victim and what his motivations had been. The only thing Hannibal takes away from this is that Will Graham is unprecedented in his life and everything about Hannibal thunders with his name.

“It’s the Chesapeake Ripper, although not everybody believes it yet. It would break his cycle of three if it were him.”  
“Is the cycle important?”  
“Yes. I just don’t know if it ever really existed.” Will rubs his eyes with his forefinger and thumb, pushing up his glasses. “It’s the only thing we’ve been sure of so far, that he kills in cycles, but I just don’t know. I think he might have been killing all this time, but we never connected the murders to him. He doesn’t feel like he’d be content to just kill three and then sit back and bask in that for months.”  
Hannibal nods, thinks how right Will is, how he could either kiss him or kill him for being so clever. “You believe the Ripper has been killing consistently.”  
“Possibly for decades, yes. And Jack is so far unwilling to accept it because that would make him the most successful serial killer of all time and Jack hasn’t been able to catch him yet.”  
Hannibal tries not to feel too flattered. Time for a change of subject, anyway, as discussing cases always wears Will out quickly and he has yet his more personal issues to cover.

“Are you still having the dreams?”  
“Every night. I’m afraid to go to sleep. I keep myself up too late watching crap television but wake up drenched in sweat on my couch with the stag’s smell still up my nose.”  
“You need sleep, Will.”  
“I know that. I just wish there was a magic pill I could take that would stop the dreams.”  
 _There is_ , Hannibal thinks, _I believe they call it arsenic_. But that’s not what he says. “REM sleep and dreams are necessary for your mental health. Your dreams right now might be very far from pleasant, but they are just your mind working through the images you subject yourself to during the day. The stag is nothing more than a reflection of your fears.”  
“So you’re saying I should celebrate it and feed it sugar cubes.”  
“You know my thoughts on the matter.” Will does, and Will says nothing further. He fidgets, scratches the side of his nose, and weighs whether or not he should say something while Hannibal waits.

“What does it mean if you dream about intimacy?” he comes out with.  
“Surely you don’t need me to explain that to you, Will.”  
“I don’t know. Maybe.”  
“We’ve never discussed these sorts of matters during our sessions before. Would you like to?” He knows Will is attracted to Alana, but that’s something they’ve only ever discussed outside of this office. He knows nothing else of his private life, which is odd if only because it is generally one of the first things people come to talk about with their psychiatrist.  
“I don’t know that either. It might be awkward.”  
“How so?”  
“Because I dreamed about you.”

It takes him a few heartbeats to catch up to that, mostly because he hadn’t expected Will to just come out with it so frankly. “I see,” he hears himself say and all he can think of is whether Will is referring to the kiss exclusively or if there might have been more going on in his deteriorating mind than Hannibal has been privy to.  
He thinks of how sexual dreams about someone in no way imply a genuine sexual desire at all. He thinks of how he’s not sure he wants there to even be one, even if the prospect of Will _wanting_ him in any shape or form is more than he could ask for. He thinks about how the human psyche has odd ways of interpreting affections, and how nobody should ever fool themselves into believing that an innocent erotic fantasy is an indication of valid emotional attachment. He also thinks of how much he doesn’t want to repeat this to Will right now, so he simply presses on in the name of professionalism.

“How long have you been experiencing these sorts of dreams?”  
“They started after you kissed me.”

His words drop like a bomb into Hannibal’s office. For a moment that lasts longer than Hannibal cares for he genuinely has no response. Will is just sitting there not looking at him and Hannibal doesn’t like that little sliver of distress that tells him he’s lost full control of the situation. 

“I’m not stupid, you know. You may have almost had me convinced that I made it all up, but it made so little sense I just… and then you, with your ‘I care so deeply.’ I can’t believe you just pretended it didn’t happen,” Will says.  
If Hannibal’s chair had a panic button he’d be thumping the life out of it right now.  
“Say something!” Will exclaims, and there’s an anger underlining his words that Hannibal wants to frame and put on his walls.

“I may have to recommend you seek another psychiatrist,” he manages to get out, but he sounds entirely unconvincing.  
Will snorts out a derisive sort of chuckle. “Oh, come on. I don’t want another psychiatrist. I don’t want a psychiatrist at all, but if I have to have one I’d kind of like it to just be you.”  
That strokes Hannibal’s ego in a pleasant sort of way, despite the situation, but he can’t dwell on that right now. “I have behaved in an utterly unprofessional way. I can no longer in good conscience remain-”

“I’m barely even officially a patient. Let’s not dally on protocol.” He’s getting defensive, irritated even. Hannibal has wrestled his way into Will’s life, gained his so incredibly hard-won trust, and is now threatening to take himself away from him. It’s no wonder Will snaps at him like this, all bristles like a small angry dog. He stands up and paces aimlessly across Hannibal’s office, his back to Hannibal, gathering all defense mechanisms he has and going out his way to not have to look at him. 

“Protocol is important, Will. How do you expect me to stay objective?” Will can evade all he wants but Hannibal is, at the end of the day, a predator. He stands too, moves around Will in a deliberate, wide circle and, as such, effortlessly finds himself back on top of the situation. It’s almost a dance – Hannibal steps in, Will steps out, Hannibal curves into Will’s eye line and Will side-steps him out of it. Hannibal could write entire articles about this behavior, long ones full of expensive words. He is endlessly entertained.  
“You’re not _that_ attached to protocol, don’t pretend you are.” Oh, very observant. Hannibal can only smile at that. “Why’d you do it, anyway? If it endangers your objectivity regarding me so much, why give me that kiss?”  
This halts their dance. Will is looking at him again, though not making eye contact, and Hannibal keeps his eyes down for an accommodating moment which he supposes Will has earned.

“I find you… very attractive.” It’s a risk he isn’t sure he’s prepared enough to make. He’s acutely aware of it dangling over his head, but can’t exactly not say it, as occasionally a slice of truth is the only way to keep all the lies believable. A dozen different scenarios race through his head - all of which end with Will walking out his office never to be seen again, which goes against just so many of Hannibal’s purposes. He’d rather enjoy a nice, violent tantrum over it. “I should never have acted upon it. I realize this is not only unprofessional but also highly unethical, and I must apologize. I should have cut you loose as a patient the moment I understood the depth of my feelings for you.” A muscle on Will’s jaw twitches. He looks like he doesn’t want to be where he is right now, and Hannibal has to admit – it does hurt, just a touch. Bedelia would have a field day with that one. 

“Why did you let me believe the kiss was a hallucination?” There is hurt in Will’s voice now. Hannibal has to stop himself from drawing conclusions.  
“If you realized it wasn’t, it would damage both our professional and our personal relationship beyond repair. Your initial response into believing it had not happened was , to me, a convenient way of being able to pretend I had not lapsed in my conduct so horribly. I am afraid my motivations were quite selfish, and again, I must apologize. I have made a staggering amount of mistakes as of late.”  
“I’ve been walking around not knowing what was real about – about _everything_. Do you even know how terrifying that is? To just give me another reason to believe I am losing my mind in order to save your own ass… is very cruel.” Something boils under the surface of Will’s composure and Hannibal wants to itch it out of him, just to see what it’d look like. He wonders if it has teeth.

“Would you have felt better knowing the kiss was real?” he asks.  
“I didn’t mind the kiss in itself,” Will says irritably, as if this should have been obvious. His eyes flicker upwards and finally meet Hannibal’s again, briefly before it becomes already too much and he looks away again. Hannibal wonders if Will realizes how weak this makes him look, a submissive sort of animal. He’s all but rolling over to show him his belly, and Hannibal is the kind of creature that doesn’t respond well to exposed soft tissue.  
“You do not object to the kiss. You object to being lied about it.” 

“Are you still psycho-analyzing me?”  
He is, actually, still trying to be professional and dependable for Will, but now that it’s been pointed out to him he understands it’s a bit ill-fitted. “Yes. You’d rather I didn’t?”  
“I’d rather you react as the man who tucked me into his bed and kissed me, not the one who’s supposed to help me not see dead people whenever I close my eyes.”  
And therein lies their problem. Hannibal can’t be both. It’s about as unethical as could be, but it seems Will wants him to be both, and Hannibal wants to see how far he can stretch it before it snaps. 

“If I react as the man who kissed you it would simply end with me kissing you again. Do you want me to do that, Will?”  
The tension in the room turns up instantly, and it’s Will who cuts through it. It’s a sudden movement - he all but springs forward like some fuzzy little predator attacking its prey, but instead of claws and teeth there’s insistent lips on Hannibal’s mouth and fingers on the sides of his jaw. There’s no grace in the kiss, just a lot of urgency and one very clear message that Hannibal receives eagerly even if he knows he shouldn’t for more reasons than Will could even begin to anticipate. 

His hands go to Will’s shoulders, pulling him in before crowding him back until he, less than gently, bumps into one of the pillars holding up the balcony. Will’s hands drop from Hannibal’s jaw and Hannibal takes control of the kiss easily, slipping his tongue between Will’s teeth. Will is clearly not accustomed to kissing another man and flounders messily into following rather than taking the lead, his hands fidgeting across Hannibal’s chest and around, fingers sliding over the expensive fabric of his suit jacket but never quite daring to grab hold. Hannibal wishes he would, but Hannibal is a patient man and knows that, eventually, he will.

He has Will all but pinned against the pillar, sliding a tentative hand up Will’s throat and sternly reminding himself not to squeeze, and he’s not really that much bigger than Will but just enough to make this all quite thrilling. Will has to agree, he supposes, even if he tastes confused and overwhelmed and an erratic tremble rocks him every so often. He works his thigh between Will’s and presses. Will groans into his mouth and Hannibal nearly short-circuits. 

“Perhaps my office is not the most suitable place for this,” he mumbles against Will’s mouth, wet words on slick lips, and Will swallows and nods. His glasses are crooked and Hannibal reaches up and gently plucks them off his face. Will blinks at him, nods, looks to the side and rather sort of _giggles_ , a half-insane sound that comes out more desperate than he thinks Will intended it to.  
“You’re not putting this in a report to Jack, are you?”  
“Oh, I don’t know,” Hannibal murmurs, nipping across Will’s jaw and biting once, sharply, at his earlobe. “I might tell him the development of your ability to connect with another person is absolutely admirable.”  
“Oh God. Ow,” Will says, laughing, and Hannibal wishes his laugh were flesh so he might eat it.

“I have a patient coming for his appointment in about fifteen minutes,” Hannibal says regretfully, dragging them both back into a reality that probably won’t be so kind about a psychiatrist sucking on his patient’s tongue in his office (let alone a serial killer still pressing his thigh into an FBI special investigator’s erection, but that’s something Hannibal is going to have to work out another time).  
“You’ve got to be joking. Cancel it?”  
“My 24-hour cancellation policy works both ways, I’m afraid.” 

He looks over Will’s delicate face, his skin darkened red, his pupils dilated, his lips swollen and slightly parted, and dives in for just one more taste. Will accommodates him with such ease that Hannibal actually does consider cancelling just so he can undress him and drape him across his desk, but now that he knows how badly Will wants him he rather likes the idea of keeping him wanting just a bit longer.  
“Come to my house tonight?” he says after he breaks the kiss, his lips right next to Will’s ear.  
“Awake or asleep?” He feels Will’s little half-grin, against the corner of his jaw, and returns it into the crook of Will’s neck.  
“Awake, preferably. Come early, I’ll make you dinner.”  
Will nods and Hannibal bares his teeth against Will’s skin.


	4. Chapter 4

His last appointment crawls by at a pace that sets Hannibal’s teeth on edge. It seems hardly fair to his patient, a highly neurotic senior manager struggling with inappropriate feelings for not only his secretary but also his secretary’s husband, but Hannibal considers just getting it over with and turning the guy into sausage more than once during his allotted hour. He holds himself back, of course, just smiles and nods and pretends to listen. His focus drifts and he finds himself thinking of Will and everything that comes with him. The tang of cheap aftershave on Hannibal’s tongue as he nipped at Will’s earlobe, the smell of coffee on his breath as Hannibal kissed him, the bones of his shoulders shifting underneath Hannibal’s hands as he shoved him back. He’s all sensation to Hannibal and he wants to open him up and look at all the beautiful treasures he carries under his skin. He feels anxious like a child on its way to Disneyland. 

He drives home a little faster than he ought to, but as always entering his kitchen instantly brings him a great amount of inner peace. Zen, he might even call it had he been so inclined, but Hannibal is very far from a spiritual man. He flicks through his recipes for something pleasant, something not too complicated, and ends up settling on a nice blanquette de veau with mushrooms and white rice (and a vaguely histrionic fitness instructor standing in just fine for the veau). While time had slowed in his office it all but flies in his kitchen as he cooks, and he’s already making up the plates when his doorbell rings. It’s a fine dish, pale meat with a pale sauce and pale garnish, and he finishes the plate with a single deep red Althaea flower just to make it pop. 

Will has changed his outfit, suggesting he actually drove back home for an hour and then drove back up to Baltimore. Hannibal doesn’t much see the point as he’s still all plaid and sensible shoes, but that’s how Will just is and he appreciates him for it. Will walks sheepishly into his kitchen, carrying a bottle of Zinfandel wine. A nice Merlot or perhaps a Pinot Noir would have gone better with the dish, but at least it’s a red and not a white and since Will could only guess as to what Hannibal would wind up preparing for him he thanks Will for it with near-theatrical flair. He serves them their food and Will sits at the dining table and stares at his plate.

“What am I eating?” he asks.  
“Veal,” Hannibal lies effortlessly.   
“It looks gorgeous. All that white and then that red flower. Considering the time you had to prepare.”   
“It’s not a complicated dish. It’s just the presentation that makes it appear so,” Hannibal says, pouring the wine.   
“Do you ever just eat like a normal person, though? Leftover spaghetti in front of the television?”   
Hannibal laughs. “I am not too fond of pasta, and I always eat at my dining table. I find food to be worthy of receiving my full attention. I do, however, eat leftovers. When nobody’s watching, of course.”   
“The illusion is shattered,” Will says, raising his wine glass, and Hannibal laughs again.

Will eats the food with an enthusiasm that tickles Hannibal for reasons he cannot voice, and conversation is civil if occasionally more flirtatious than it had been before. There’s just a touch of unease underlying Will’s composure, nothing but a confirmation that this isn’t something he does often, and Hannibal burns with curiosity but doesn’t ask. He serves him a bright red dessert, just to offset the main course, a blood-colored berry pudding with vanilla sauce and a sprig of mint. Will all but licks the bowl clean and Hannibal tries not to be too distracted. 

Despite Hannibal’s protests Will insists on helping him clear the table. He piles the dishes into the dishwasher while Hannibal washes the crystal by hand, save for the one glass Will is still using to drink his third glass of the Zinfandel.   
“So are we ever going to touch on how you ravished me up against a pillar in your office?” he says over the rim of his glass, the wine having eased him a touch.   
Hannibal smiles at him, drying his hands on a dishtowel. “I was working up to that, actually, now that we’ve finished our dinner.”   
“Okay. Good. Because I was stuck as to how to bring it up.” He grins, and Hannibal kisses the last of the wine right off his lips. 

Will puts the glass on the counter, nearly too close to the edge, and Hannibal pushes it further up to safety without looking. Will is warmer than he was this afternoon, a good meal and good wine doing their work, and Hannibal pictures his insides as he kisses him deeply. His heart pumping steadily. His lungs expanding and contracting with each breath. His liver, his kidneys, his stomach, his blood finding its way through his arteries. He pictures Will’s brain releasing a sound stream of oxytocin, decreasing cortisol, leaving him as putty in Hannibal’s hands. He wishes he could crawl inside of him just so he could see all of it, down to the smallest chemical processes, and witness firsthand everything that makes up Will. 

Will kisses him with more confidence now, lapping at Hannibal’s teeth, his hands resting on Hannibal’s waist. Hannibal lets his own hands wander, from Will’s face to his hair, his neck, down his back. He leaves one hand right there, just above the swell of his backside, while the other goes back up and cups Will’s jaw.   
“What happens now?” Will asks, his eyes still closed. Hannibal wishes they weren’t but he can’t really just pry them open, and this is probably quite a lot of sensory input for Will to digest as is.  
“What do you want to happen?”   
“I can honestly say I have no idea.” He chuckles dryly, pressing his face into Hannibal’s neck. Hannibal likes it there and wraps an arm around Will’s shoulders. It’s a quiet, deeply intimate sort of hug, and Hannibal is pleased with its implications. Will’s heart thumps steadily against Hannibal’s and he matches him nearly beat for beat.

“The options are limitless. You can, of course, choose to go home. You can stay the night. We can do it all over again tomorrow, and the day after, or share just tonight and go back to how things were before that afterwards.” He’s holding the reigns out to Will, but only because he knows Will is not actually going to take them. It’s all an illusion, the puppet believing he controls his own strings but the puppeteer still tugging them just out of sight.   
“I’d already kind of decided I wouldn’t be sleeping in my own bed tonight,” Will says with quiet amusement. “Wouldn’t wish to deprive you of another opportunity to tuck me into bed and kiss me goodnight like some mentally unstable fairytale princess, after all.”   
Hannibal chuckles, pulls back to feather kisses across Will’s jaw. “Does that mean I get to ride up on a white horse?”  
“I don’t know. Can you ride?”  
“Of course.”  
“Why do I even ask, right?”

Hannibal laughs again, even if it’s just at the mental image of him, of all people, as Will’s knight in shining armor. He has truly no idea, no suspicions at all, and Hannibal has him wrapped so tightly around his finger that it threatens to cut off his circulation.   
“Shall I suggest we take this to the bedroom?” he says smoothly, and Will nods, swallows, and opens his eyes. The eye contact is brief but intense, and Hannibal wishes he could snap a photograph of the look on Will’s face in this moment because it’s a rather grand compliment regarding his kissing abilities. Might look nice, in a pretty frame over his fireplace. Of course Will as a whole would look lovely mounted on his wall, but something tells him that would be a bit more difficult to explain to Jack Crawford the next time he came over for dinner. 

In his bedroom he closes his curtains, and leaves the door open for Will to wander in after him. He takes off his suit jacket, puts it on a hanger, and unties his tie. Will watches him, looking oddly wary.   
“Something the matter?” he asks him while he unbuttons his cuffs and rolls up his sleeves.  
“You prepare yourself like this when you’re about to cook too. I’m feeling weirdly like you’re going to turn me into dinner.”   
Well, that’s apt. A thousand responses cross Hannibal’s mind, each more delightfully cliché and double-edged, but eventually settles with unadulterated glee for the worst he can think of. “You do look good enough to eat.” Oh, if the world only knew just how _funny_ he was.   
Will simply makes a face as if he’s bitten into something particularly sour, and Hannibal laughs and kisses him for it. 

Will’s hands fist in his shirt and Hannibal could sing. The fabric protests but he doesn’t care. He has more shirts, and Will is more than welcome to rip it off him if he so desired. He doesn’t, of course, he smoothes his palms down Hannibal’s back instead, so Hannibal pushes him back until he hits the bed and stumbles backwards onto it. Hannibal descends, straddles his hips, unbuttons every button he can find and nearly does give in and strangle Will when he learns he wears a t-shirt underneath all that flannel.   
“I should probably mention I’ve never done this with another man,” Will says to his ceiling.  
“Don’t worry, I have,” Hannibal breathes into his neck and shoves his hand down the front of Will’s jeans for good measure. Will gasps, Hannibal kisses him and drinks it down.

Hannibal has Will naked before Will has the opportunity to fully repay the favor and he has to sit back and take him in for just a moment. Will is thinner than Hannibal thought he’d be, ribs and sternum just about visible under all that pale skin. His arms and legs are strong though, even if his ankles and wrists are bony. His hair is ruffled, and he looks somewhat intimidated under Hannibal’s scrutiny. Hannibal bares his teeth, takes Will’s hands and puts them beside his head, a perfect picture of submission. His Botticelli angel, indeed. 

He straddles his hips again, pins his wrists to the mattress, and knows from experience Will would not be able to escape easily from a hold like this one. Will arches into him for his trouble, throws his head back, and Hannibal gets to watch his Adam’s apple bob as he gasps.   
“The things I’d like to do to you,” he can’t stop himself from saying, the words escaping from between gritted teeth, and he presses his mouth to Will’s breastbone and feels his heartbeat under his lips. Will tugs on his wrists, wishing to free his hands, but Hannibal won’t let him just yet. He licks his way up his chest, chasing his pulse up his neck, feeling the prickle of his facial hair across his tongue and kisses the breath from his lungs before he lets go. Instantly Will’s arms fly around his neck, pulling him closer, and he returns the kiss with such enthusiasm Hannibal finds his own breath stolen from him just as much. The laugh that bubbles up his throat nearly hurts him and Will swallows it regardless.

He rolls off him, sheds the last of his clothes, and then they’re both naked and there is an awkward moment of too much skin but Will reaches for him with rapt fascination, and Hannibal reigns him in.  
“So this is what you hide under all those layers,” Will murmurs into his clavicle.  
“Don’t talk to me about layers,” Hannibal retorts, running a hand down the knobs of Will’s spine to his ass, taking a shameless hold and grinding them together. Will begins to chuckle a protest but unravels into a moan and Hannibal can live with that. 

He puts his fingers underneath Will’s chin and tilts his head up. “Listen to me, Will. I am giving you one opportunity to say no. If we go on now I will not stop again, even if you’ll ask me to. Do you understand?”   
For the first time it seems Will becomes aware of how Hannibal is, actually, bigger than him - broader in the shoulders, the chest, perhaps not much taller but just enough to ensure that he would be quite capable of physically overpowering him. It flickers in his eyes, this realization, and his hands twitch on Hannibal’s shoulders.   
“Do you want to continue?” he asks and he already knows Will is going to say yes. 

Will nods. Hannibal gives him a grin, reaches for his bedside cabinet, and positions Will on his stomach across the mattress. He takes his time with him. A man of Hannibal’s age is in no way inclined to rush towards the ending of anything, not even something as delightfully titillating as the last breath of a particularly rousing murder victim, and sex is no exception to this. He gives him too much too fast, Hannibal knows, he _knows_ he’s hurting him, but Will’s breath stutters with every practised thrust of Hannibal’s fingers, and it feels like he’s playing a particularly well-tuned instrument. 

He considers finishing Will like this, he could make him orgasm like this more easily than even Will probably believes he can, but also knows it would leave himself dissatisfied if only because he yearns to dominate him as completely as possible. He moves, positions one of Will’s legs up, drizzles more lubricant than necessary on them both and pushes in without warning. Will grunts and goes quiet as they both need a moment to adjust their realities to _this_ , this deep and overwhelming intimacy Hannibal supposes they’ve both been without for a long time. He plasters himself tightly against Will’s back, wraps his hand firmly around Will’s erect cock, and starts fucking him so thoroughly that the bed springs squeak an indignant protest. 

Will gasps back to life, reaching one arm back to pull Hannibal impossibly closer and writhing into him so beautifully that it wrests a genuine sob from Hannibal’s throat.   
“Please,” Will breathes, and Hannibal bites down hard on his shoulder and Will is already gone, crying out hoarsely and ejaculating messily over Hannibal’s hand. 

Hannibal lets him ride it out, then pulls back and out, leaving Will momentarily confused until he pushes him onto his back, settles between his spread legs and thrusts back in, arms wrapped tight around Will’s shoulders. Will pants for air, legs going up and around Hannibal’s waist, and Hannibal presses his face into Will’s neck so tightly that he can’t breathe. He reaches orgasm just like that, his lungs screaming for air, and Will clinging to him for dear life while making the sweetest, breathless little noise on each thrust. 

“Oh God,” Will murmurs into his hair as they slowly descend to Earth and Hannibal laughs, licks the sweat from the hollow of his throat, laughs again. “My shoulder hurts, you maniac.”  
“You’ll learn to appreciate it.”  
“I know.” Will breathes in deeply before he nuzzles his ear, and Hannibal isn’t quite sure what Will means by that. “So this happened.”  
“It’s still happening, I’d say.” He receives a laugh for that in return, right into his hair. 

He rolls off him, and runs a hand through his hair. Will reaches for him but he evades him, moves instead to turn Will to his side so he can once again press himself close to his back. He likes it there. Will is not a small man by any means but lying there, his back to Hannibal, he is a mess of poor construction, his spine like brittle sticks and string quivering in the wind. Hannibal feels solid and alive behind him as he presses close and puts his arm firmly around what’s his. He imagines a great chasm might open somewhere about his breastbone, a great gaping mouth, with which he might swallow Will whole and keep him safe within the cast iron of his ribs.   
Hannibal has never been about keeping people safe. He feels positively elated about Will bringing that out in him, even if his ideas about safe aren’t quite the same as everyone else’s.

“I’ll probably have nightmares,” Will says softly after they’ve lain together for a while, evening out their heartbeats and listening to each other’s breathing.  
“Not to worry, if you threaten to sleepwalk from my bed I’ll reign you right back in.” He means it too. He’d tie him to the bed if necessary, but thinks his arms will do just fine. He presses a kiss into Will’s hair, still slightly damp with sweat, and revels in how nice he smells. Sex has left a primal, pure scent on him, and Hannibal wonders if he could bottle it somehow. He’s reminded of a German novel he read while in medical school wherein a young serial killer brews perfume out of dead girls. He ponders the chemical processes and whether it might actually be possible. 

“I’m not too worried about the sleepwalking,” Will says, pulling Hannibal out of his train of thought.  
“It’s all right, Will. I won’t let anyone get to you.” He means it, too. There is only one person who could get to Will Graham, and he is right there.

Will shivers, and while Hannibal is fairly certain it’s not because he’s cold he reaches up and pulls the sheets up over them.


	5. Chapter 5

Morning tugs early on the following day, a milky sun rising over Baltimore. Hannibal hadn’t slept much, just dozed a little with Will curled up next to him like a little pill bug. Will is a restless sleeper, his eyes twitching constantly behind closed eyelids, limbs jerking, a thin sheen of fresh sweat on his bare skin. Hannibal wants to cut his nightmares out his skull and drown them like a litter of kittens. 

He watches him now in the thin trickle of light squeezing in past his thick curtains. The knobs of his spine, the little dents over his hips. The sparse light deepens the shadows under his shoulder blades and makes him into a kind of ghost, there in Hannibal’s bed but not quite. Hannibal inches closer, pulls Will into his chest and pulls the sheets up around them a bit higher. He watches as the light brightens, goes from blue-white to a soft yellow. Will’s breathing is steady and shallow and Hannibal is half aroused for reasons he can’t quite pinpoint. Physical proximity, he supposes. He places his mouth on Will’s shoulder, presses his teeth in just hard enough to leave a mark but not to hurt too badly. He entertains himself with it for a bit, sucking, nibbling, and by the time Will is fully awake Hannibal has left a hickey on his shoulder the size and color of a nice, ripe plum. 

“What’re you doing?” Will says, his voice hoarse with sleep.   
“Waking you up,” Hannibal says, running his thumb over the mark he’s left. Not quite ‘property of H.L.’, but it would have to do.   
Will turns, craning his neck to see the mark but finding it just outside his line of sight. “What time is it?”  
“Nearly six. I was not sure whether you needed to be somewhere this morning.”  
Will closes his eyes and nods. “I have class at nine.”  
“So we have time, then.” He dives in, presses his face into Will’s neck and traps his legs under his own. Will lets out a drowsy chuckle and Hannibal considers building a monument on its perfect foundations. 

Later, when it’s getting close to seven and after they shared a shower which took genuinely longer than strictly necessary, he makes him coffee and a quick breakfast of eggs and gammon. He watches Will shovel it down as he sips his coffee and enjoys the rare fluttering in his heart. He wonders if he should name those butterflies, and if they’re genuinely there or if his human veil is becoming so convincing he’s beginning to fool even himself.

He watches Will drive off, continuing to watch for a good five minutes even after he has turned a corner and disappeared, and rather wishes he had put him on a leash so he could have yanked him back. He has his day to start, lunch to prepare, patients waiting on the sidelines, but all he genuinely wants to do is grab his pencils and a large piece of paper and sketch out that image still so bright behind his eyelids. Will naked, positioned aesthetically amidst Hannibal’s white sheets, his hair ruffled and his hands firmly pinned up by his head. He might just actually get started on it later today. He doesn’t think Will would appreciate it much if he were to, say, frame a picture like that and hang it up in his office, but he rather itches to get it out of his mind and on paper. It’s such an exquisite vision, after all. 

He takes some time during his lunch hour to set up the initial sketch but has no chance to work on it further. His day is packed with appointments, and on top of that, one unexpected session jumps in between. He’s just finishing a session with a middle-aged socialite struggling with a frightful case of OCD, letting her out his office, when he spots Will sitting in his waiting room. He is, plainly put, a wreck. There are shadows under his eyes Hannibal doesn’t remember being there that morning, his shoulders are hunched in defeat, and his face appears frightfully hollow. Something happened, and Hannibal is hit with the intense need to turn whoever responsible for this into a nice stew. Something with red wine and carrots.

“Will?”   
Will looks up, drawn from whatever cold, dark hole his mind had pushed him into, and immediately stands and steps into his office without invitation. He sinks down onto the chaise longue, puts his head in his hands and sighs.   
“Tell me what happened,” Hannibal simply says as he sits back against his desk and waits.   
“Crime scene,” Will says. “A bad one. I didn’t... my reaction to it was...” He trails off, rubs his hands down his face as he looks up. “The Chesapeake Ripper again.”  
Unless disassociating and losing time is a sexually transmittable disease, Hannibal highly doubts whatever crime scene Jack has thrown Will onto was caused by the Ripper. He hasn’t committed a decent spot of murder since Tuesday, after all. “Are you sure about that?” 

“It had his signature. Victim posed and exposed. Horrifically tortured. Organs removed.” He closes his eyes and sighs a shaky sigh. “It was a child.”  
“What?” A bright stab of indignant anger flares up in Hannibal. A child? How dare they connect that to him. He’s never hurt a child in his life. He’s a cannibal with standards, after all.  
“A boy, thirteen years old. He left him in a playground, suspended from the monkey bars. A group of kindergartners and their teacher found him this morning, it was...” Will loses his words and Hannibal watches them slip away from him. He sits there, mouth opening and closing as he attempts to catch them. “He was still alive when the killer... he must have been in a lot of pain. I saw... I felt. Christ.” Will shudders. Hannibal wonders if he ought to go over and offer him comfort, some physical sort of reassurance, but reminds himself Will is here as his patient, not his lover, and he needs to react accordingly.

“And you are sure it was the Ripper?”  
“I’m not convinced. He’s never targeted children before. Jack wants me to work it out.” He closes his eyes. “I just don’t know what to think of a world where someone uses the Chesapeake Ripper’s methods in order to kill a child.”  
“A copycat killer possibly more of a monster than the original. I see.”  
Will nods and smiles a sad smile. “I found that to be a little difficult to swallow, apparently.”  
“Did you disassociate?”  
“I wish I had. I had a panic attack. Flubbed some excuse and pretty much fled the crime scene.”  
“And came to me.”  
“Yes. I don’t – I’m sorry. I didn’t know where else to go.”  
“Don’t apologize. I am always here for you.”   
“I know. I just – I know.”

He gives in. His psychiatric license is screaming at him for it, Bedelia might just hit him upside the head with something heavy and expensive if he ever told her, but he steps in and pulls him close. Will leans his head against his stomach and makes a sound close to relief that Hannibal feels weirdly proud of. He caresses his hair and lets him breathe.   
“This case is clearly too much for you to handle, Will. You need to ask Jack to take you off it.”  
“No. I need to find this guy. I really do. I just need to find a way to not panic at his crime scenes, I need to... I need to _function_.”  
“You can’t expect yourself to function if you purposefully trigger yourself.”  
“Yes I can. He’s going to kill again. You don’t do something like this just once. There will be more, and if they’re…” He chokes on the word. “Children. I have to catch him, I have to.”

Hannibal sighs. He can see Will’s reasoning, he really can, but of all the things Hannibal wants to guard him from, his own sense of responsibility seems to be at the top of the list. Again, he considers a gilded little cage and Will safe inside it, his songless fragile little bird. Wings made of knives, palms up for absolution. He swallows and closes his eyes, focusing on Will’s hands finding their way to the small of his back.   
“I can teach you ways of counteracting panic attacks,” he says calmly, curling a lock of Will’s hair around his fingers subconsciously. “Breathing techniques, sensory distraction. But these will require a lot of focus, and cannot help you if you push yourself so hard you disassociate again.”  
“Sensory distraction?”  
“Keep something in your pockets to touch when you feel a panic attack coming on. It helps ground you.”  
“You help ground me.”  
“I won’t fit in your pocket, I’m afraid.” 

Will makes a sound against the fabric of Hannibal’s waistcoat that might be a laugh or might be something else. Hannibal steps back and Will looks wistful, a bit rumpled, his eyes large and round in a forlorn face. His hands drop back to his lap slowly, as if he’s not entirely sure whether he’s let go yet. Hannibal wants to kiss the tips of all his fingers, grab a sharp pencil, redraw Will’s fingerprints so they match his own. 

He kneels, touches Will’s face, and kisses him with about as much tenderness a cannibal can muster. He’s too greedy, too much tongue, too much teeth, certainly far too much the urge to swallow Will entirely just to make sure he could never drift away, but Will needs it very much and Hannibal can feel him spin away from the happenings of today under his fingertips.   
“Better?” he murmurs against Will’s lips.  
“Much.” Will chuckles, a puff of breath across Hannibal’s mouth. 

“Good. All right,” Hannibal says as he straightens up. “Let’s analyze this killer. Maybe I can help you with a profile.”   
He doesn’t say he needs Will’s input more than Will needs his. There are, after all, more ways than one to stop these killings so Will won’t be confronted with the crime scenes any longer. Will closes his eyes, nods, and allows Hannibal to weave his web securely around him.

That night Will shows up at his door long after dinner, worn out from an unnecessarily long session of staring at a dead child in the morgue with the forensics unit breathing down his neck, and sleeps with him again. Hannibal fucks him with abandon and makes him come, very loudly, not once but twice, violently driving any unwanted darkness from Will’s mind and replacing it with his own. Afterwards Hannibal watches him sleep, laying on his back with his arms up over his head like a child, and knows he would kill every last person in the world to keep him there.


	6. Chapter 6

They settle into the strangest rhythm. Hannibal still sees Will as a patient, at least once a week. They talk about his – rapidly deteriorating – mental state, the case, his dogs, but oddly avoid the topic of their blossoming relationship. Then, most evenings, Will shows up at his house and they have sex. Sometimes it’s brief, hard, and particularly noisy. Other times it’s slower, more languid, Hannibal taking his time to explore Will completely, Will becoming boneless and pliant, and Hannibal teasing his orgasms out of him with lazy ease. Either option ends with marks on Will’s skin, stained sheets and Will falling fast asleep by his side.

Hannibal wishes he could say Will sleeps like a baby when he’s with him, but Will never does and probably never will. He has nightmares. Occasionally Hannibal has to get out of bed in the dead of night to steer a sleepwalking Will back in. On one momentous occasion Will wakes from a violent night terror, fists flailing, and Hannibal has to come up with an explanation for a split lip that isn’t ‘my lover accidentally punched me in the face because he was having a nightmare about a crime scene’. 

Another child is murdered by Hannibal’s dreaded copycat. A girl this time, twelve years old. She’s found in the dance studio where she would take ballet lessons every Thursday, positioned in a perfect dying swan, several ligaments cut to make sure she stays that way and a metal rod stuck through her center as if she were a cocktail onion. Her liver and stomach are gone, the wounds in her abdomen neatly stitched up. The autopsy shows she was still alive not only when the killer removed her organs, but also while he sewed her back up and dressed her in a spotless white tutu. Even Hannibal finds himself somewhat unsettled by this notion, and as could be expected Will winds up shutting down completely in his kitchen. He sits in Hannibal’s leather chair and stares ahead with empty eyes while Hannibal cooks him what he considers comfort food - borscht with mushrooms and slices of an angry man who had cut Hannibal off on the freeway a few weeks back (the same one, incidentally, whose crime scene sent Will’s sleep-rattled fist flying at Hannibal’s face, so Hannibal supposes he may have actually deserved that).

“What am I eating?” Will asks once it’s done, running a spoon through his bowl and watching as the fresh cream mixes with the pinkish red soup.  
“Borscht, with pork. It’s a Lithuanian recipe, although we traditionally serve it cold.” He figures Will might prefer something warmer now, and watches as he ladles a few spoonfuls into his mouth.  
“It’s good,” Will says. “I don’t think you’ve ever served me anything from your country before.”  
“I prefer other kitchens. It seemed apt, though.”   
“I like it.”  
“Good.”

After dessert, a passion fruit cheesecake served with a single decorative passion fruit flower, Hannibal takes Will upstairs and eats him out until he barely remembers anything except for Hannibal's name. He rolls Will onto his back, diagonally across the bed, slides into him and fucks him for an impossibly long time. Will even comments on that, once they’re spent and panting across each other’s skin, mentioning that honestly, Hannibal is a rather virile man for his age, and Hannibal bites him on the shell of his ear for that. 

The evening is young still, and Hannibal seduces Will into taking a bath with him. Hannibal’s bathroom is a lavish thing, all comforts present, including a gorgeous claw-footed tub just about big enough to accommodate two grown men. Will sits with his back against Hannibal’s chest, dozing ever so lightly, and Hannibal considers the intimacy of the moment. The confined space, the warm water, the closeness of their naked bodies. It’s almost womb-like, primal, and he feels slow and sated and happy.

The hickey on Will’s shoulder is still there, if fading. It’s turned into a mess of small spots and blotches in yellow and brown and Hannibal thumbs it, his modest property marker.   
“I feel like you’re about to grab a bottle of ink and a needle,” Will says lazily, “so you can tattoo your name onto me.”   
“You caught onto that.”  
“I’m not an idiot.”   
“I’d never dare suggest such a thing,” Hannibal says, and he smiles against the back of Will’s neck.  
“I like seeing it, in the mirror. I think I’ll be a little sad when it’s faded completely,” Will says.  
“I’ll keep on making new ones then.”  
“You do that.”   
Hannibal puts his mouth to the mark, bites down lightly and considers drowning the both of them in his bathtub so the moment wouldn’t have to end.

***

Jack doesn’t appear surprised when Hannibal shows up at his office two days later. This bothers Hannibal. He knows it’s not that predictable for him to be there, and as such he knows Jack is, in fact, surprised to see him, but his refusal to show it keeps him on top of the situation, and that’s really the spot Hannibal prefers for himself.

“Dr. Lecter, come in. To what do I owe the pleasure?” Jack smiles at him, but Hannibal feels forewarned. Two alphas in one room, he reminds himself. Careful with the amount of throat you bare. 

“I was wondering if I could speak to you about some things.”  
“By ‘some things’ I am going to assume you mean Will Graham.”   
Hannibal inclines his head as he sits down on a chair in front of Jack’s desk, his coat folded up on his knees. The chair is on the low side, not enough for it to be really noticeable but enough to make him feel it, and it’s a bit ridiculous. Just another way for Jack to have the upper hand in his office, offering his visitors a chair like this. He’s already not too pleased with Jack right now, and this isn’t helping. _Stew_ , he thinks to himself, _with red wine and carrots._

“Your latest case. The murdered children. It is causing him to suffer greatly.”  
“It’s causing all of us to suffer. Cases of this caliber leave no one untouched, Dr. Lecter.”   
“If all of your team reacts the way Will does, I fear for the bureau.”   
Jack stretches his lips across his teeth in something Hannibal couldn’t possibly call a smile. “No one on my team does, which is why Will is such an asset.”  
Hannibal sighs, twisting his hands unseen in his coat. “He’s having panic attacks. Night terrors. He’s even disassociating.”  
“He didn’t mention this to me.”  
“Did you ask him?”   
“Yes, I did, actually. I asked him if he could handle it, more than once, and he assured me he could.”  
“In which case, he lied.”

Jack looks deeply unhappy for a moment, as if he’s been forced to swallow a bug. “Will makes his own decisions. If he chooses to work the case, do you really expect me to order him not to? When he’s possibly the only person at the bureau right now with the ability to solve this case?”  
“It is within your capacity to order him not to. I would expect you to carry that out if necessary.”  
“Children are dying, Dr. Lecter.” Jack’s raising his voice. Hannibal isn’t easily intimidated. “Surely you understand that taking him off the case would be of no benefit to him at all. What’s he to do, sit at home and go off the deep end wondering if he could’ve prevented number three, four, five?”

“I find it worrying you say you care for Will’s mental health, but refuse to stand up to him for it.”  
“That makes two of us then, Dr. Lecter.” It feels like they’re fencing. Stab, stab, stab, I know more about where you come from than you think I do.   
“You asked me to create a profile for Will, and help him handle his issues. I cannot help him heal if he insists on continuously throwing himself onto shards of glass.”  
“I see.” Jack sits back, closes his suit jacket over his stomach. “You are very protective of him. Are you this involved with all your patients?” There’s a double entendre there that Hannibal knows Jack used deliberately. Jack Crawford is a highly intelligent man, with instincts that far surpass those of many. If anyone knows, if anyone can read his affections for Will off his face like a roadside advertisement for car insurance, it’s Jack.   
He forces a smile. “Will is exceptional, I assure you.”  
“I agree. Which is why we do need him on this case, and I do hesitate to forcibly take him off it. He falls apart, then he puts himself back together and goes back in. He told me so himself.“  
“Will doesn’t put himself back together. I do.”  
“Then you keep doing that.” 

Hannibal considers how many people there are down the hall. How quickly they might make it here. How much time he would need to overpower a big man like Jack. The risk is entirely too great, but he’s dying to take it. Grab a pen off Jack’s desk, jam it into his carotid artery. Scrape the smile off his face with his letter opener. 

“Freddie Lounds’ ever-entertaining website informs me that you suspect the Chesapeake Ripper murdered these children,” he says instead.  
“Freddie Lounds informed you of this or our Will? I know he is inclined to disagree. I trust his instincts enough to err on the side of caution with him, but I still feel we need to keep the possibility open.” Jack seems relieved with the change of subject – quite odd, considering the nature of the subject Hannibal chooses to go to.   
“The Chesapeake Ripper doesn’t target children.”  
“He hasn’t before, but that doesn’t mean he won’t.”  
“I will agree the cases share certain similarities, but that does not mean it is the same killer. The Ripper’s methods have been widely publicized. He could have inspired many who teetered on the edge.”   
“Would a man like the Chesapeake Ripper really permit someone to copy him like that? Especially one who takes his atrocities and ups them a notch?” 

His words slice, and Hannibal doesn’t think Jack really intended them to. He is not wrong, however, and that doesn’t sit so nicely with Hannibal.

“Are you implying you are letting Freddie Lounds spread the word to see if the Ripper will make it obvious that it wasn’t him?” He wonders acutely whether Jack had made Lounds do that before. Would he risk a human life to further his investigations?   
“Miss Lounds has her own agenda, I’m afraid, consisting mostly of ad sales and fickle fame. Do you really believe it wasn’t the Ripper?”  
Hannibal averts his eyes and nods. “It doesn’t feel right. If ‘right’ is ever the correct term to use in these matters.”  
“I will keep your feeling in mind.”  
“I’d rather you keep Will’s.”

Jack says nothing, offers him a meaningless smile. Hannibal returns it and they sit and show each other their teeth and pretend they’re not both predators in their own right.

*** 

Will is late for his appointment, mumbling an excuse about falling asleep at his desk, but he looks troubled and Hannibal can’t tease a decent response out of him for at least the first twenty minutes. 

“You’re very distracted tonight,” Hannibal says. Will sighs and stands up. He wanders a bit around Hannibal’s office, restless, hands in his pockets. He’s wearing the bluish gray shirt with the buttons at the collar that looks so incredibly good on him. It seems to emphasize his physique, his masculinity, while the shade does spectacular things to his eyes. Hannibal considers burying all of Will’s flannel in his backyard and buying him a dozen of shirts like this one instead.  
“Too much to worry about. I’m sorry, I’m not of much use to you tonight,” Will says tersely.   
“I am supposed to be of use to you during these hours, not the other way around.”  
Will smiles his sad, yielding little smile, toeing the edge of the rug on the floor of Hannibal’s office.

“I saw Jack Crawford today.”  
“So I heard.”  
Jack told Will about it, then. One-upping Hannibal again, taking control by informing Will. Hannibal stands up from his chair and clasps his hands behind his back to stop himself from chucking books across the room like a toddler throwing a tantrum.   
“He told me you’d prefer if he took me off the case. Did you really say that to him?”  
“I suggested it. Did I overstep?”  
“Yes. You’re not my keeper.”

“Then I apologize. I didn’t mean to make it seem like I was. I merely worry that you are not making the right choices for your self-preservation.”  
“Then talk to me about that, not to Jack. I don’t need him still seeing me as that fragile little teacup.”  
Hannibal nods, watches Will amble around aimlessly. “I want this case solved as much as you. I just don’t want it solved so badly I’ll let you lose yourself over it.”  
“I’m sticking together so far.”  
“Hmm.” Hannibal looks down, inhaling deeply and holding his breath for a moment he finds oddly empty. He wants to fill it with something violent and perhaps a bit messy, but no opportunities present themselves easily.

“Is this supposed to be me?”  
Will is holding up his drawing, a perfect pencil portrait of Will amidst rumpled sheets. He’d forgotten it was there on his desk, half-finished amidst other sketches.  
“Yes. My apologies, I hadn’t intended to leave it out in the open like that.”  
Will makes a face, frowns, and squints his eyes. “It’s… good. Very good, actually, though I have to say you’ve certainly embellished me a little.”   
“How so?”  
“Well. I don’t really look like this, you know. All ethereal, with the smoldering bedroom eyes. Although I will admit I need a haircut about as much as this drawing implies.”  
Hannibal snorts out a laugh. “You do look like this, actually. Don’t worry though, I won’t reveal your true nature to anyone.”  
Will laughs as he puts the drawing down. “Yeah, same. Don’t leave it out though. I don’t know if I want any of your patients getting an eyeful.”

Hannibal doesn’t immediately grasp what Will means with his ‘same’. There’s a sharp pang of knowing what he’d _like_ it to mean, something he finds worrying and a little too hopeful of himself, but he ignores it with the ease of a man who’s been doing that for about forty years and stays with the drawing. “Don’t worry, it’s just for me. A reminder of what I miss when you’re not there.”  
“Frightfully romantic notion, Dr. Lecter,” Will says, turning into him and kissing him in a way that warms even the dead parts of Hannibal’s heart. “Who knew you had it in you.”  
“I certainly didn’t,” Hannibal murmurs, running his hand down Will’s back. “I do believe we decided already my office isn’t the best venue for this behavior, however.”  
“If you can draw semi-pornographic pictures of me in here, then you can damn sure give me a decent kiss,” Will says, so Hannibal does.

The kiss deepens quickly, one of Hannibal’s hands on the small of Will’s back and the other loosely around his neck before he’s even realized he’s put them there. Will is eager to submit to him, tilting his head, giving him more of this throat, and Hannibal presses his teeth to the underside of Will’s jaw. There’s a desperate tremble in Will’s hands, his shoulders, and Hannibal guides him around to perch against his desk. There he sinks into his chair, trailing his hands down Will’s chest as he does.

He shouldn’t do this in his office. He really, absolutely shouldn’t, but it’s so delightfully taboo and Will stands, leaning back slightly, hands gripping the edge of the desk as he looks down at Hannibal and seems to be barely breathing in anticipation. Hannibal unbuckles his fly and unbuttons his jeans and feel incredibly, endlessly _hungry_. 

The breath Will had been holding stutters out him as Hannibal takes him deeply into his mouth. This isn’t one of his favorite things to do but doing it to Will has its merits, even if it’s just the sheer adoration he catches fleeing across Will’s face when he glances up. He bobs his head and sucks, and Will threatens to keel over backwards across his desk and that, too, is worth the uncomfortable strain in his neck and jaw. One thing Hannibal cannot stop being annoyed by, though, is the small detail of Will’s delightful prick being circumcised. There is only one person allowed to permanently mutilate Will Graham, as far as he’s concerned, and it’s incredibly bothersome that some nameless doctor saw to it that Hannibal would never see Will in the perfect unmarred state he was born in.

The front door to his office opens and there’s the unmistakable sound of someone taking place in his waiting room. Will tenses, head whipping around to the door.  
“My next patient,” Hannibal whispers, popping Will’s prick from his mouth. “You’ll have to be quiet, Will.” He grins and slowly slides Will back in.  
“Christ,” Will says, barely more than a gritty exhale between his teeth. Oh, but this is good. Will struggles, trying to decide whether he’s actually okay with doing this while nothing but a thin slab of wood separates them from a stranger, and Hannibal gives him everything he’s got. One of Will’s hands flies up to his mouth and he bites down on the back of it, surely to keep himself from crying out, but Hannibal reaches up and harshly pulls his hand back down, tearing Will’s own skin from between his own teeth in a way that can do nothing but hurt sharply.

Will ejaculates with sudden, shocked urgency and Hannibal swallows eagerly. He keeps a tight grip on Will’s hand, an angry red bite mark on the back of it, and doesn’t pull back until Will has started to go soft on his tongue.   
“Christ,” Will repeats. “You evil bastard.”  
Hannibal grins up at Will while he neatly tucks him back into his jeans, buttons him back up, buckles his belt. He’s aroused, painfully so, but refuses to give into it. Later tonight, he thinks, he will have Will on his hands and knees on his bed and will do whatever he pleases to him. 

For now he stands, brushes his hands down the front of his suit jacket, and leans in to brush a lingering kiss across Will’s lips. “I do believe this concludes our hour for today, Mr. Graham,” he says, and Will chuckles across his mouth.


	7. Chapter 7

A third child dies. At ten, he is younger than the previous two, and he has been abandoned in a manner that almost implies reverence. He is sat in the middle of a church courtyard, dressed in an altar boy outfit that his parents swear he’s never worn before, his hands and feet wounded to imply stigmata. Nothing sacred about the way his torso has been opened up, all the way from clavicle to pubic bone, the internal organs the killer did not take with him as trophies spilled into his lap. Will describes the crime scene to Hannibal and has to excuse himself to vomit until he’s got nothing left to give. Hannibal brings him a glass of water, rubs a hand between his shoulder blades, and pretends the tears on Will’s face are simply his eyes watering due to the violent heaving. 

“We need to catch him,” Will mutters miserably, sitting on the tiled floor of Hannibal’s small office bathroom. “He’ll just keep going and going if we don’t.”  
“And Jack still believes it’s the Chesapeake Ripper.”  
“Nobody knows what to believe anymore. Even I’m starting to think it might just be him anyway, despite all the little things telling me it isn’t.” 

That actually stings a little. He doesn’t want Will to turn him into some blame-all for anything disturbing in his life. Hannibal is not, after all, the omnipotent murder stag of his nightmares. “Is the investigation getting anywhere?”  
“Beverly and I worked until 3 AM last Tuesday compiling a list of possible suspects, but it’s useless. People vaguely connected to the kids who have exhibited problematic behavior in the past. We’re talking about people who took dance classes in the same building and were arrested once for beating someone into the hospital. We might as well just question everyone in Baltimore. Grasping at straws is what we’re doing.”   
“Can I see it all the same, though?”

Will shows him the file, a reasonable pile of criminal records, gritty pictures of unfamiliar faces, and he just knows. Maybe it’s killer instinct, maybe it’s a predator always knowing the face of another like him, but he knows. A medical student who volunteered at a pediatric health centre for a while. Only one of the children is directly connected to him, having been treated there for a persistent case of chicken pox two years ago, but it’s enough. Something in his eyes, maybe, a cold hunger Hannibal knows intimately. The idea of this rat being mentioned in the same breath as the Chesapeake Ripper sickens him.

“We have nothing real on any of them. This case needs a break so bad,” Will says, and Hannibal thinks he needs nothing of the sort.

***

It’s an overcast Sunday when Hannibal finds his house too empty, with its high ceilings and spacious rooms, and knows it only feels this way because he’s alone in it. It’s a startling conclusion, but there’s a finished sketch sitting in a delicate frame on his bedside table telling him what’s causing it and he’s oddly okay with that.

He shows up at Will’s house a little after dusk, carrying a paper bag with something he will convince Will is steak. There is no answer after he knocks, which has him worried for a few minutes, but then one of Will’s dogs peers comically onto the porch, and Hannibal follows him around the house. The dog, a black, brown and white mutt, walks beside him with its tail wagging lightly. Hannibal can never manage to remember all their names – there’s quite a few of them, after all. He does wonder how Will picks those names for them and makes a mental note to ask him sometime.

Will is behind his house, doing something involving a wooden boat perched on a small trailer. Hannibal knows absolutely nothing about mechanics or boats and doesn’t understand Will’s fascination with them, but Hannibal has to admit he’s walking up to a bit of a postcard picture. Will is so engrossed in his work that he hasn’t noticed he has company, working with his sleeves rolled up and engine grease dotted all the way up to his elbows. His dogs are spread out around him, watching him work, as the sun sets in the background. The boat can use a coat of paint, but something tells him Will is going to see to that eventually. Will is good at this, his hands moving confidently, and Hannibal is endlessly enamored with him for it. Nothing, after all, is as attractive as competence. 

“I knocked, but you didn’t hear me,” he calls out.  
Will starts, straightens, looks absolutely confused for a moment. Hannibal loves that. He loves catching Will unaware as Will is so utterly incapable of masking his surprise whenever it happens. “Sorry,” Will says, turning a small screwdriver over in his hands. “I was busy.”  
“I see that. New boat?”  
“Old boat. Bought it in an auction. It just needs a little love, really.” He shrugs. “It keeps me distracted, you know.” Losing himself in the innards of a boat motor rather than those of a small child. It’s a fine coping mechanism if Hannibal has ever seen one.

One of the dogs, Winston if Hannibal’s memory serves him well, pads up to Hannibal and presses its head against his hand. He scratches it behind the ears and the dog sits down next to him with the kind of devotion in its eyes only dogs seem to be able to muster. Boats and dogs. Will’s life. Hannibal smiles and squeezes himself in between.   
“It’s important to have hobbies,” Hannibal says. “Nothing as uninteresting as a man without interests.”  
Will chuckles as Hannibal steps up and steals a kiss from the corner of his mouth. He smells good, in a filthy sort of way – motor oil, a metallic smell mixed with fresh sweat and a tinge of something healthy and alive Hannibal equates with the outdoors. It’s a very masculine scent that makes Hannibal feel a bit heady.

“Why are you here? Not that you’re unwelcome.”  
“I missed you. Thought I’d come over and cook for you.”  
“You _missed_ me. Oh, dear.”   
“Yes, I know. Quite bad, isn’t it?” Will gives him a half-grin that Hannibal wants to eat right off his face.

Will heads into the shower as Hannibal heads into Will’s kitchen. The dogs putter about him with interest and he throws them the tiny slivers of meat he slices off his steaks. He considers life like this, this pleasant domesticity. Not in Will’s tiny house, with its impractical kitchen, boat motors in the living room, and the creaky little porch. In Hannibal’s house, rather, Will within his walls, reverberating across his windows and doors. The dogs would be a problem. Hannibal can’t see them in his house – or rather, doesn’t want to see them – but knows Will would not wish to part from them. Still, there are ways, especially now the dogs trust him and eat his table scraps so willingly. 

Will emerges from the bathroom, still toweling his hair dry, just as Hannibal finishes the food.  
“There. All grease and other assorted dirt scrubbed off.”  
“And perfect timing.” He eyes him as he strains the vegetables, his skin pink from the hot water, the smell of shampoo and soap intermingling with the food scents from the kitchen. Hannibal never knew there were so many ways to be hungry all at once.

“I am shocked and amazed you can make something like this in my kitchen. You’re sure you’re not secretly a wizard?” Will says, eyeing the, if Hannibal may say so himself, perfectly cooked steaks.  
“I think a wizard would have had less trouble cutting the meat properly, considering those blunt chunks of metal you call knives. I also find it hard to believe you do not own a kitchen thermometer.”  
“I’m a troglodyte. What am I eating?”

Hannibal would think it obvious. “Steak au poivre with asparagus spears and herbed potatoes.” Will’s china is nowhere near as nice as Hannibal’s, but he was able to spruce up the presentation anyway, choosing clean, vertical lines for the composition, and it’s an uncomplicated dish that effortlessly matches the Will he’s seeing here. Will in his home, his comfort zone, with his boat and his dogs. He sits at his own dinner table in a clean T-shirt, at ease and rather delightfully happy to have Hannibal there. 

Hannibal had brought dessert, but they don’t quite get to it right away. There’s a solid hour of skin and breathless worship between the two courses instead, Will more daring than Hannibal has seen him so far and riding him with his head thrown back in such beautiful abandon that Hannibal can’t even put it in words. The rich chocolate mousse he’d prepared at home in advance, blended with rum and dark coffee, is eventually shared entirely against Hannibal’s principles in Will’s bed, devoured with two eager spoons right out the Tupperware container Hannibal brought it in. Not very cultured, he has to admit, but it tastes fine all the same.

They lay together, under the window over Will’s bed, watching the stars come out one by one. Hannibal has one of Will’s wrists in a vice grip, and Will is tracing little patterns on the inside of Hannibal’s wrist with his free hand. He can smell the clean scent of Will’s skin, Will’s hair, now only slightly tinged with sex and Hannibal’s ownership, and he can feel Will’s heart beating against his ribcage. He shifts his fingers and feels Will’s pulse on his wrists too, counts to it, and listens until it beats out his name.

“It’s weird to have you here,” Will points out, his voice humming on Hannibal’s naked skin. “We’re only ever together at your house.”  
“I know. Should I have come here sooner?”  
“Yes, I think you should have.” There’s an impertinence to the way Will says it that makes Hannibal want to pin him with his hands and knees and kiss him until there is no air left in his lungs.

Will’s phone buzzes once and goes quiet. Will doesn’t even respond to it, remains quiet with his head on Hannibal’s chest. Hannibal appreciates his loyalty to the moment but knows there are plenty of reasons his phone might be going off that they should not ignore. He reaches a long arm to Will’s jeans, crumpled up on the floor, and fishes the phone out of his pocket. He sees Alana’s name across the screen as he hands the phone to Will.

Will reads the text he’s received but seems to pay it not much mind, tossing his phone onto the bed where it gets lost between the folds in his sheets.  
“Not important?” Hannibal asks.  
“Not right now. Alana wants to talk. She thinks I’m being avoidant.”  
“Are you?”  
“Yes, actually.” Will leans up, an elbow on Hannibal’s chest, and seems to be scrutinizing Hannibal’s mouth. Hannibal knows that’s just so he doesn’t have to make eye contact, but he allows it. “Been a little too busy doing scandalous things with you of late.” He kisses him lightly, merely taking Hannibal’s upper lip between his. Hannibal closes his eyes and holds his breath when he feels the touch of Will’s teeth. He pushes a hand into Will’s hair and kisses him back thoroughly for that.

“You should not neglect your social obligations in my favor,” he says, guiding Will’s face into his neck not too gently, thinking that he rather wishes Will would just throw out his phone and delete his name from every record it’s ever been placed in. He thinks Will ought to delete himself entirely so Hannibal can move into his skin and live there, a loving parasite in his flesh and bones.   
“I’ll call her tomorrow,” Will mumbles against his throat. His beard scratches across Hannibal’s skin and Hannibal feels gooseflesh break out on his arms and legs. He allows the sensation, shivering pleasantly, until Will starts to suck on his pulse point and Hannibal turns them over, trapping Will underneath him. He’s heavy, and Will’s breath is pushed from him in a hushed, excited giggle. 

He moves down his body, and bites down on the tender skin over Will’s ribs until Will cries out in pain, but never asks him to stop.


	8. Chapter 8

Will slowly becomes a mess of hickeys and teeth marks. It’s all hidden under layers of clothing but Hannibal knows they’re there. Sometimes he fancies he can feel them, little beacons of possession calling out to him. He wishes for more. He wishes for scars and tattoos and his name scratched into Will’s ribs with a pen knife, and he traces the letters of his name with his fingers and his tongue all over Will’s skin while Will shudders and trembles and becomes a perfect picture of submission under Hannibal’s greedy hands. 

There is an odd turning point when Will bruises him for a change, leaves a massive purple blotch over Hannibal’s hipbone that he keeps revisiting with his tongue and his teeth. Hannibal is hit with the strong urge to make it permanent, to grab his scalpel and carve ‘W.G.’ right into it, which is new. Hannibal has always left proof of his existence on others in creatively nameless ways that he’s actually quite proud of, but he’s never allowed anyone to leave any kind of evidence on him. Will is different, and he’s not sure why this realization surprises him, because he’s touched before on how unprecedented Will Graham is in his life. Possession, it appears, doesn’t end with your name on your lover’s body. It’s a two-way road where the possessor ought to be as equally marked as the possessed. 

“You’re mine,” he whispers into the back of Will’s neck one very early morning where he’s woken him up just to slowly and meticulously fuck him into his mattress before the day has even well and truly begun.   
“I know,” Will replies in a hushed tone which implies life-long knowledge of things Hannibal has never told anyone. Hannibal digs his fingernails into Will’s hips and wishes he could somehow merge them into one half-person made of teeth and dark things.

Still, the world pushes up against the two of them no matter how much Hannibal tries to keep it out, and it’s scratching at the gates of the fortress he’s constructing from their bones. One quiet evening his doorbell rings and the door doesn’t open. Will has the odd habit of ringing the bell but not waiting for Hannibal to open the door, just barges right in like he belongs there which, as far as Hannibal is concerned, is absolutely true. He does wonder if Will ever notices how absurd it is for him to leave his door unlocked in the middle of Baltimore – Wolf Trap, it is not – but if he does, he’s never mentioned it. The silence after the ring tells him it’s someone else, and he’s not surprised to find Alana Bloom on the other side of his door. He had, quite honestly, been waiting for her.

“I need to talk to you,” she says, annoyed. She strides past him in a beautiful pair of burgundy heels and heads into his kitchen. Odd choice. He wasn’t actually in there at the moment, as he was instead rereading the Süsskind novel in his living room, but he supposes she knows the kitchen is the heart of his house, and if she wants to hit him where it hurts, that’s the best place to do it. 

“All right,” he says. “May I offer you a drink first?”  
“No, thank you, I’m driving,” she says dismissively, and he wonders if he ought to point out he does actually have non-alcoholic beverages in the house. “What are you doing with Will?”  
She jumps right into it and he gives her a blank stare as he ponders his answer. He doubts she’d appreciate an honest answer, even if it’s just because that would entail much more lurid detail than she’d care for, but the way the question was posed proves that lying or evading it altogether would be rather futile. She already knows what he’s doing with Will.  
“I assume he’s already told you that,” he says.   
“Yes, yes he did. Hannibal, what are you _thinking_?!” She throws up her hands, her fingernails painted a modest shade of golden brown. 

“I’m not entirely sure what to say to that,” he answers honestly, and she is the perfect picture of beautiful exasperation.   
“He’s your patient! It could cost you your license!”  
“He’s not officially my patient. He doesn’t pay me, for one. We just have conversations.”  
“And then you sleep with him.”  
He shifts his weight from one foot to the other and feels uncomfortable. “I am sleeping with him, yes. Which is not quite tied to our sessions at all, I feel a bit odd about you connecting the two like that.”

“You can’t compartmentalize a relationship that way. You can’t expect him to divide himself up in two people to suit your needs - Will your patient versus Will your boyfriend. It doesn’t work that way. This is going to damage him!”  
He’s never thought of Will as his boyfriend before. Lover, yes, property, all the time, but ‘boyfriend’ turns their affair into something cheerful and peppy and it’s an odd word to choose. “Will is not made of glass, Alana.” It hits him how odd this is. Insisting to Jack that Will is fragile. Insisting to Alana that Will is not. They are both true and not true, and he uses them to suit his own needs.  
“Will is highly unstable, and you blurring the boundaries of a professional relationship he strongly needs isn’t helping him. You _know_ this, Hannibal. I can’t believe you, of all people, are just ignoring that in favor of yourself. I struggle to understand that coming from you, I really do. Why are you doing this to him?”  
He says nothing. He thinks it ought to be obvious, even if it would expose him as the egotistical creature he really is.

“Are you in love with him?” Ah, obvious after all.  
“Are you?” he asks and watches her flinch.  
“You’re deflecting.”  
“So are you.”  
“Hannibal, for God’s sake, you’re not twelve.” There’s a bunch of tomatoes on his counter and she looks vaguely like she’s going to pelt them at him. The idea amuses him.  
“I feel very deeply for Will,” he says, answering her question by not actually answering her question. “He is of extreme importance to me in a way I have never quite experienced before.”   
“You know that doesn’t make it okay. If you love him, if you really do, you’ll let him go and give him room to fix himself first. He shouldn’t be in a relationship at all, not with anybody, but especially not with his own psychiatrist. It’s so shockingly selfish, Hannibal!”

“Is that why you turned down his affections?”  
She flinches again, more violently this time, as if he’d just sprayed her with water like some unruly cat. “He told you that.”  
“Yes. Quite some time ago, actually, before he and I happened.”  
A whole array of emotions trail across her face before something of a professional mask comes over her and she accepts it. Hannibal knows this information about her, knows about this history between her and Will. Okay. She can handle that. “Yes,” she says, straightening her spine and raising her chin. “That’s why I turned him down. My feelings for him are not as important as his well-being.”  
Now, there’s a jab. “And his feelings for you?”  
“Are also not as important as his well-being. Just because he wants something doesn’t mean he has to get it, especially not if what he wants is no good for him. This applied to me, and now, apparently, applies to you. You’re a psychiatrist, Hannibal, you know this! And apart from Will needing to figure out who he is and how he works before attaching himself to another person, he’s now attaching himself to the one person who is offering him stability and insight into himself. We’ve all had patients fall in love with us, Hannibal, and we all know why we don’t take advantage of that when it happens!”

“I am not taking advantage of him!” His temper slips away from his for a split second, the veil sways in the breeze, and it startles her visibly. He reigns himself back in with precision, withdraws his fangs, and salvages what he can. “I know this all looks very questionable, but I assure you I have nothing but his well-being in mind.” It’s a lie so fierce he can almost taste it, like the sharp tang of blood on his tongue.   
“No, you don’t! I’m sorry, Hannibal, but you don’t! You’ve allowed your own feelings for him to blind you. You need to step away!”  
“Step away as his therapist or as his lover?”  
“Both,” she blurts. “His therapist, most obviously, but his lover too. You’ve tangled things too much now. This isn’t salvageable anymore.”  
“He enjoys my company. He says I ground him.”  
“Of course he does, of course you’re his rock! Doesn’t mean you ought to be sleeping with him! The Chesapeake Ripper is doing him damage enough without you adding further complications, Hannibal!”   
Oh, the irony. 

“You simply need to back off,” she continues. “I understand this will be hard for you too, but you need to recognize that his needs right now are higher than yours because he sure isn’t capable of doing that himself.”  
“Did you have this argument with him, too?”  
“Yes. Yes, I did. It wasn’t pretty, but he needed to hear what I had to say, and so do you. I know you as a level-headed professional, please don’t disappoint me .”

He imagines her saying these things to Will. He imagines her saying these things and Will hearing them, and he imagines what they might make Will do, and rage licks at the edges of his control. Fine. He takes his sword, parries, and lunges. “I am not sure what is motivating you to come here and say this to me, Alana. I can’t help but feel you wish to keep him available, so he’ll be there for you if you change your mind.”  
She reacts with immediate fire. “How _dare_ you.” It’s that fierceness he so admires in her, that fighting spirit. He feels oddly removed from it, like baiting a caged tiger, but reminds himself a tiger is more than capable of dragging you through those bars and devouring you anyway if you step too close. “My feelings for Will have nothing to do with this! I am here as his friend, nothing more. Don’t ever try to turn me into the kind of person who wouldn’t be.”

He considers killing her. He remembers smashing her head against the wall in the Hobbs’ house, remembers the satisfying thunk of bone on brick, and imagines doing it again. Harder this time, not a thunk but a crunch, as deeply rewarding as tapping a spoon through the caramel crust on a well-made crème brûlée. He doesn’t quite appreciate killing people in his own home, though - such a mess - and to be fair, he doesn’t quite appreciate the idea of plainly killing Alana either. He _likes_ Alana. She’s clever, kind, and very attractive, and he considers her one of the more pleasant embellishments of his life. Will ranks higher, of course he does, so if it really came down to having to murder her to preserve Will’s little cage, he would not hesitate. For now, however, he’d prefer some less finite methods, while they’re still an option. 

“I would rather prefer for you to leave now,” he says quietly, and she looks at him with such surprise that he could slap her across the face for it. He knows he’s never kicked her out of his house, he knows he’s never actually kicked anyone at all out of his house like this, but it’s what anyone in his position would do. It’s just another suit to wear: the lovelorn intellectual, blinded indeed by the intensity of his affections, guilty but perhaps not as accountable as she’d like. People excuse a lot in the name of love, he’s learned.   
“What? Hannibal, you can’t just-“  
“It’s late, I’m tired, and I do not owe you this discussion right now. Please. Before this gets truly out of hand and we both say things we will regret. I would rather not lose you as a friend over this, and if we continue now, I fear I might.” He’s only doing it as this has sparked a discussion he knows he’ll lose because Alana is more right than she even knows. Rudely cutting it short in the guise of politeness is the best move he can make at this point. “Please. I see your point. Don’t ask me to defend myself right now, I cannot and I won’t. I love him, Alana.” The words feel foreign and trivial on his tongue and he hates them intensely. He’s angry with her for forcing him to say them, because they could never mean what they ought to and they will never be good enough for the truth of all this. He could grab a pair of pliers and pull out every last tooth in his mouth for having had to witness this. He feels sick with it and struggles to keep it off his face.

She blinks, clearly unhappy, but swallows it. “Alright,” she says. “If that’s how you want to end this, fine. But I’m not going to support what you’re doing and I only hope you’ll come to your senses, and you know we’ll just have this conversation again a later time.”  
He says nothing, forces a smile she can clearly see is sour like curdled milk, and escorts her to the door.

“I’m just so worried about him,” she tries, standing in the door opening. “Please, Hannibal.”  
“I’m sure Will appreciates your concern,” he says and closes the door. He hears her walk away, heels clicking on the pavement, and hears her utter an expletive he’s glad she didn’t express in the house because he honestly does not appreciate such language. He walks into his living room and stands by his fireplace, counting up to a hundred in his head, thinking of blood and guts and the nature of the lion falling for a damaged if decidedly sharp-toothed lamb.

***

Will does not come to his house that night. Hannibal lies alone in his bed, deeply worried, and considers just driving over to Wolf Trap but never gets out of bed to do so. He eventually wakes shortly after dawn, surprised with himself for having even managed to fall asleep at all, and wanders through his cold house for a few hours before finally going to his office. 

***

Hannibal sees six patients, eats his dinner by himself, and finishes reading his book in the early evening. His day has felt heavy for reasons he prefers not to specify, and is immeasurably improved when his doorbell rings, his front door opens and shuts, and he hears Will hang up his coat. 

“Will, I thought I wouldn’t see you any more today,” he says as he walks into his hallway to greet him.  
“Long day. Interviewing relatives of Sarah Teague, the dead girl... not the most fun way to spend your time. And after that I had to watch over Zoë for some time. She’s been kind of sick and vomited all over the porch.” It takes Hannibal a moment to remember Zoë is one of Will’s dogs. The little one, if he’s not mistaken.   
“I missed you last night, too,” he says. It’s something of a risk, he knows that, but it’s rather true. Will does this little nod, purses his lips, and avoids his eyes, and Hannibal thinks about killing Alana again.   
“I’m sorry. I didn’t think... well. I was tired and went to sleep early.” 

“After Alana left.”   
One of Will’s arms flies up, as if he’s trying to swat away an imaginary fly, and he lets out an uneven, sarcastic laugh. “Oh, that’s just great.” He stomps into the kitchen and Hannibal follows, wondering if he ought to put a sign up that reads ‘I do have other rooms in my house.’ Will paces back and forth in front of the counter, heading towards the fridge but seemingly changing his mind at the last minute and turning back. He’s allowed in the fridge, really, if he were perhaps considering a drink or some such, and Hannibal isn’t sure what made him back off.  
“Did she come by your house?” Will asks.  
“Yes. After she left yours, I assumed. You told her about us?”

Will nods, running a hand through his hair and keeping it there for a moment. “We were just talking about things. It came up. I don’t... I just told her. I’m sorry.”  
“While I do prefer to not publicly broadcast my personal life, our relationship is not a state secret, Will. You are allowed to share this with the people closest to you if you desire.”  
“Small circle of people to share with,” Will mutters, and Hannibal is more than aware of that. It’s why he dared to offer him this nugget of freedom, after all. Will has exactly two people in his life he would share this kind of personal information with, and now that he’s told Alana, the both of them already know anyway. 

“I take it she wasn’t much more pleased with you than she was with me?” Hannibal says, and Will laughs that cruel, sour laugh of his again.   
“She called me reckless. She said you were a sharp knife I shouldn’t be cutting myself on at this point in my life.” Hannibal can appreciate that metaphor, and he thinks Alana knows him better than he perhaps gives her credit for.   
“She didn’t come here to yell at you, did she?” Will asks.  
“She rather did, actually. Not that I can’t handle that.”  
Will closes his eyes. Hannibal imagines he’s counting to ten, repressing something violent he feels he shouldn’t express. Hannibal wants to press a knife into his hand and urge him to let it out, just to see what his face would look like when he did. He might be his Botticelli angel, his perfect beauty, but nothing falls as magnificently as a creature of pure grace.

“She told me to step away from you. She believes I am doing you damage,” Hannibal says.  
“She said that?”  
Hannibal nods, catches Will’s eyes as he opens them again. “Is she right, Will? Am I doing you damage?”   
_Yes_ , Hannibal thinks.   
“No,” Will says. “Not even close. I can’t believe she said that.”

“She’s speaking as a professional. She’s not wrong, you know.”  
“Yes, she is! Look I know – we’ve had this discussion, all right, the two of us. It’s not her business. She needs to back off.”  
“It’s natural for her to worry. She has feelings for you, same as you do for her.”  
Will’s jaw twitches. “I don’t. You shouldn’t think-“  
“You do, and it’s all right. I’m not concerned about that. The matter at hand is that she feels this is not benefitting your mental state.”   
“I don’t think anything has ‘benefitted’ my ‘mental state’ as much as you have,” Will spits. “You’re the only person in my world right now I can manage to make sense of.”

“That might be what she feels is undesirable about this,” Hannibal says. “You are losing control of yourself and are looking for something to hold onto. That something is me, but she feels, rightly so, you need to find this something within yourself. Am I stopping you from doing this, Will?”  
Of course he is. He’s carefully sawing away at everything that holds Will up until he’ll have nothing else to fall into but the bear trap of Hannibal’s loving arms.   
“I don’t know,” Will says with an exhale and a look of utter despair in his eyes. “Maybe. I don’t. Are you breaking up with me?”

Hannibal decides to say nothing. He looks away, touching a hand to the surface of his kitchen counter, and lets the silence do its work.  
“You can’t be serious! You’re letting what she said get to you?”  
“As I said, she wasn’t wrong, Will.”  
“Yes, she was! I know what this looks like from the outside, all right, but she doesn’t know how this... how we work. What we have, this is good, alright?”   
It’s so far from good there’s no words to accurately describe it, but it’s nice that Will doesn’t seem to realize this at all. Hannibal considers that a success, really.  
“You are too important to me for me to risk your wellbeing. You cannot want that either,” he says. “If I have to tear myself away from you to keep you sane then I will.”

Will’s face screws up with indignant anger. He throws himself at Hannibal, something Hannibal had already been anticipating, and kisses him with everything he’s got. He presses himself so close Hannibal has to brace himself as to not be pushed right over, and lets all of Will’s despair, his longing, his hurt, and his deep and utter need for him take him over. It tastes better than anything Hannibal has ever put in his mouth, and he resists the urge to chew.

“Screw sanity. I never had much of that to begin with anyway. I don’t want anything but this,” Will says fiercely against his teeth, his hands strong on the back of Hannibal’s neck, and Hannibal could write long, epic poetry about this moment because this, _this_ is what he’s been working so hard to achieve. Bless Will for believing he’s arrived here on his own terms.  
“Neither do I,” Hannibal says, wrapping his arms around Will so tightly that he knows it has to hurt, but Will says nothing if it does. “I am a selfish monster.”  
“That makes two of us.” Will’s teeth are on his jaw and Hannibal thinks about what he’s created. He ducks his head, presses his face into Will’s neck and inhales.

“Alana is not going to be happy with this,” he says, pushing just a little more.  
“I think it’s better for everyone involved if I keep a little distance from Alana for a while,” Will murmurs, and Hannibal listens with satisfaction as the ties that bind Will to Alana rapidly begin to fray and disintegrate into nothingness.


	9. Chapter 9

Will wears the gilded cage beautifully. It’s almost a crown or an intricate choker around his neck, studded with gemstones. Hannibal imagines they might spell his name in blood-red rubies. He imagines he might attach a chain to it that he could yank every now and then. The metal might cut into Will’s skin, bite into it just below his Adam’s apple, staining the gold with actual blood, and Hannibal thinks that’s one of those brilliant ideas he needs to write down lest he forget. He wonders how long it will take him to convince Will to actually let him do it. Not gold, perhaps, not even Hannibal can afford something of such extravagance, but it should be leather at the very least. Stainless steel if he’s lucky.

It is not even two months after that awkward first kiss of theirs that Hannibal does genuinely leave his name on Will. Not on his face or neck, not somewhere visible, because while Hannibal appreciates the idea, he knows certain things are better left out of sight. He puts it on Will’s back, between his shoulder blades, where he looks frail and those Botticelli angel wings would have been in another kind of life. That’s where Hannibal writes his name one very late night when Will is a lazy, beautiful stretch of bare skin across his bed. He uses a fountain pen, knowing it would hurt and itch just a little, and places his flourish of a signature across Will’s spine. Will inhales sharply and holds his breath, then lets it out in an amused whisper of a chuckle once Hannibal finishes.  
“Finally got your way?”   
“Almost,” Hannibal says. He presses a kiss to the back of Will’s neck. “It looks gorgeous. I may have to forbid you from bathing for a couple of days.”   
“I’ll be smelly.”  
“But you’ll be mine.” 

He takes a bit of Will’s skin between his teeth and moves on top of him, head to toe, his heart beating over his name. Will makes a soft, uncomfortable sound but goes boneless underneath him. It’s a quiet moment, and Hannibal can hardly feel where he ends and Will begins. Just a matter of time. What’s written with pen now will eventually be repeated with the sharp edge of a scalpel with careful precision, carved onto Will’s skin and his heart and his soul.  
“Yes,” Will whispers half into his pillow, and Hannibal drags his tongue up the back of his neck and knows he’ll never let him go.

***

It’s a sun-dappled Thursday when Will comes into his house looking more spirited than he’s done in weeks, and Hannibal knows exactly what caused it.

“We closed the case,” he announces, flopping a folder onto Hannibal’s table. Hannibal was just setting out the wine glasses, their dinner nearly done. “The kids. It’s over.”  
“You caught him?”  
“Somebody else did.”

He opens the folder, slides a full-color photograph across the table, and Hannibal finds himself confronted with his own handiwork. He nearly smiles. The picture shows him a young man, early twenties, stripped completely naked. He’s bent backwards in an unnatural angle over a children’s school desk, his hands and feet amputated and placed neatly beside him. His face is badly bruised, a violent beating having been delivered to it before his death. He knows that, while not visible on the photograph, large slices of flesh have been removed from the victim’s shoulders and back. His death was eventually caused by a skewer thrust neatly through his skull, temple to temple, sticking out like handlebars on a really disturbed bicycle. 

The real kicker, though, are the words carved into his fleshy belly with a paring knife. ‘Never Children’ it says, neatly capitalized. It was as clear a message as Hannibal could possibly leave. 

“ _This_ was the Ripper,” Will says quietly. “And his victim here is Timothy Everton, one of the people on our lists of suspects for the murder of those three children. Apparently, the Ripper didn’t take so kindly to being accused of those murders after all.”  
“A monster with a moral code.”  
“Novel, huh?”   
“How did Jack respond?”  
“Angry, mostly. I think we all felt that way just a little. It’s somewhat embarrassing to be outsmarted by a man you’ve been hunting for years.”  
“Hmm.” Hannibal picks up the photograph, scrutinizing it a bit more. He’d almost ask for a copy. 

“They’ll have to come up with a new name for him now. Zeller suggested ‘The Cherry Hill Cutthroat.’”   
“Charming. Are you sure this was the perpetrator?”  
“They searched his house. He was keeping the stolen organs in jewelry boxes stashed in his fridge.”  
Hannibal frowns, setting the photo down. Keeping the body parts of children in jewelry boxes. He feels refreshingly sane in comparison.

“He was abused as a child, by a priest. We think that’s why he left the last victim in the church courtyard,” Will says.  
“You’d expect him to have left the boy inside the church.” Hannibal would have.   
“Too confrontational, probably.” Hannibal looks at him, his clever boy, and wonders if Will knows just how gifted he is. Even now, now that he knows this is the man who ruthlessly butchered three children, now that they are looking at pictures of his well-punished corpse, Will still empathizes with him. Even monsters are not entirely unfeeling, and here Will is, that Botticelli angel who understands this. Hannibal thinks it’s no wonder he desires him so. 

“It must be something of a relief to no longer have to fear finding another child,” he says and watches Will suffer to admit to it.  
“Yes. Horribly enough. Not sure if this is the best way to come about it, but it’s there. I’d almost want to thank the Ripper. Almost.”  
 _You’re welcome,_ Hannibal thinks to himself, running his hand across Will’s shoulder as he walks into the kitchen. He returns to put their dinner and the wine to the table, two plates balanced on his wrist. “Is it in bad taste to serve dinner with crime scene photos on the table?”

Will smiles, whisks the photos back into a folder and slides the folder aside. There, gone. Replaced by this bit of domesticity Hannibal supplies him with. “It probably says something pretty awful about us that we can eat after looking at these.”  
“We are a desensitized people,” Hannibal quips as he puts a plate in front of Will. It’s a brightly colored dish - a perfect slice of medium rare meat, orange slices placed around to suggest a sort of flower, and cheerful yellow sauce based on homemade orange brandy drizzled attractively across. Summery, he’d say.  
“What am I eating?” Will asks.  
“Duck.”   
Will catches his eye and for just a moment Hannibal feels oddly like a trapdoor is inching open under his feet. Then Will smiles, takes his knife and fork, and begins to eat. Hannibal pours them a glass of wine and thinks to himself that this has been a good day.

***

He doesn’t expect Jack to accept his invitation for drinks, not after their admittedly prickly meeting in Jack’s office a while back, but Jack accepts regardless. He shows up late, apologizing half-heartedly for it as he hangs up his coat. 

“No apology necessary. I’d hate for my hospitality to obstruct justice, after all,” Hannibal says with a flourish as he hands Jack a brandy.   
“My team held me back in the autopsy room, looking at Timothy Everton. I assume you already know about this case?”   
Hannibal nods as he sits. “Will informed me of some details during his sessions. I hope this will not get him in trouble?”   
“As long as you honor the doctor-patient confidentiality and keep those details within the walls of your office. I can’t expect you to help him with his issues if I forbid him from speaking to you about what causes them.”  
“Good.” 

“Although I must wonder if it was within the walls of your office where he confided these details to you, or the walls of your bedroom.”  
He looks at Jack over the rim of his glass, meeting his sharp eyes in the warm orange light of his hearth. Jack’s words find what Hannibal assumes to be their intended target but Hannibal betrays absolutely no surprise.   
“I know you’re sleeping with him,” Jack continues, far more conversationally than Hannibal would expect. _Teeth,_ he reminds himself. _Jack plays this game almost as well as you do._  
“How did you find out?”  
“I have a very good pair of eyes in my head, Dr. Lecter. It’s not even him who gave it away. It’s you.”   
“Oh?”

Jack gives him this look that implies a kind of belittling amusement, this oh-you-poor-lovelorn-dog that makes Hannibal want to smash his brandy glass and use the shards to carve Jack’s face off his skull. “You look at him like he’s the finest specimen of humanity you’ve ever laid eyes upon. Initially, I took it for a professional interest in an exceptional man, but I do believe it quickly became more than that, didn’t it? Need I worry about your professional conduct as his therapist?”  
“Alana Bloom thinks so.”  
Jack actually laughs at this. Hannibal can’t pinpoint what he’s laughing at, but none of the available options are acceptable to him. “So she knows, too? No, I imagine she wasn’t too happy about that.”  
“She may have yelled at me a little.”  
“Did she have the right to?” 

Hannibal doesn’t answer immediately, choosing to look like he’s weighing his words. “She worries that he’s using me as a crutch rather than depending on himself to control his issues.”  
“Which is an excellent point to make. It would be better for him to find another therapist, perhaps.”  
“Perhaps,” Hannibal gives him.  
“Although you are very good at what you do. I’d rather keep you as his doctor, which means something else might need to change.”  
“What do you mean by that?”  
“My first priority is Will’s wellbeing. If I in any way suspect that his liaison with you endangers this, understand that I am more than capable of taking measures.”  
It’s a threat. It hangs between them dangerously, and Hannibal wants to raise his hackles and snap at him. He considers the amount of sharp things in the room around them. He considers the mess it might make. He considers how many people would know Jack is here right now.   
It would be a risk, but one he feels he could control. The satisfaction alone might just be worth it. It’s rather like there’s been a giant scale between the two of them all the time that has been slowly filling with sand, threatening to tip over, and Jack just tossed in a massive boulder. 

“I’d imagine catching killers would be your first priority, but then Will’s wellbeing is rather instrumental in that,” he says musingly, observing Jack’s reaction from the corner of his eye. “Would you really go as far as to meddle in his personal life for that?”  
“I will do what is best for our joined cause. I’m sure Will would understand that.” He’s right. Jack’s hold on Will is tighter than Hannibal likes, and he knows Jack’s words are capable of influencing Will greatly. Pebbles into the scale, little sharp, stone bits of anger. “And while I’ll admit that having Everton on a slab in my morgue frees me up to worry about other issues, even if this made it quite clear the Ripper is still alive and kicking somewhere in Maryland,” Jack continues.  
“Alive and kicking to rid you of other evils.”   
“Suggesting I ought to be grateful? No, Dr. Lecter, that’s not how it works. I wanted to bring Everton to justice. This, regardless of how he suffered at the Ripper’s hands, is too simple an end. And let’s not suggest we start heralding the Ripper as some vigilante hero. He’s killed far too many innocent people for that. One monster choosing to sink his teeth into another monster doesn’t change the foundations of who he is, just means he’s hungry enough to eat his own.”   
“Are you not curious as to how the Ripper found out it was Everton?”

“We’re trying to work that out. Everton was on a list that Will and Beverly Katz put together, but was only loosely connected to the case. The mind boggles.”  
“I know. I saw that list.” He stands and collects their empty glasses. His back is to Jack as he mindlessly refills them, scenarios racing through his mind, each one delightfully more messy than the last. He knows he has to move fast. He knows he has to play for shock value, to gain him the upper hand before an actual blow is even dealt. Jack is a large man, but Hannibal has had larger on his dining table.

He keeps a corkscrew atop his drinks cabinet. He picks it up, presses his finger into the sharp point, and wonders how quickly he might be able to blind Jack with it. Drive it through his larynx, deprive him of the option to scream.  
“Did you?” Jack says. “It’s interesting that Will chooses to divulge in you his suspects of these serial killings and one of them winds up dead in a Ripper tableau. I do believe nobody else saw that list. The only people even aware of its existence were Will, Katz and myself.”  
“Yes, that is a little shady, isn’t it?” Hannibal is toeing the line and loving it there. He’s never done this before. He’s never given away this much, but he’s feeding Jack scraps and he still doesn’t seem to recognize the taste. It’s endlessly thrilling.

“You should be careful what you choose to joke about, Dr. Lecter. I might actually begin looking at you differently.” Jack smiles at him, one eyebrow raised, and Hannibal feels giddy, like he’s sitting in a rollercoaster about to head into its first spectacular descent.   
He grips the corkscrew tightly, the point sticking out from between his fore and middle finger, and lets the rollercoaster go. The release of metal cogs, the whooping sensation somewhere above his midriff, ecstatically screaming children, hands in the air. “Maybe you should, Agent Crawford. Your poor trainee Miriam Lass certainly did. And this was long before anyone even had the option of adding the insult of threatening to take my Will away from me.”  
He watches as the smile falls harshly from Jack’s face, the implication of what Hannibal just said thundering down on him from great heights. Not so funny all of a sudden, with Hannibal putting his cards on the table and revealing a rather spectacular royal flush. Jack’s eyes flicker to the corkscrew and Hannibal can see the end of this already in his eyes. He grins, and shows him the monster.

***

Will sits at his dining table in silence, hands placed on the table. He was reading earlier, having surprisingly enough picked the Süsskind off Hannibal’s bookshelf, but the book lies closed in front of him now, a page marker stuck in not too far from the beginning. He’s lost in thought, wherever that may be, his glasses off and resting atop the book.

Hannibal stands behind him, places his hands on his shoulders and kisses the top of his head. “Are you still with me?”  
Will nods, his hair shifting across Hannibal’s lips. Hannibal holds his shoulders firmly, feeling bone and muscle under his fingers.  
“Do you love me?” Will asks. It’s an odd question, especially posed like this. Hannibal considers the question, considers what Will would want to hear, and what he would want to say.  
“I do much more than that,” he says, and it’s the truth. He can never classify what he feels as love. It’s simply something not in his nature, and Will is more than aware of this.  
Will tilts his head back until he is able to look at him. His eyes are very blue, even in the dark of Hannibal’s dining room.   
Hannibal kisses his forehead firmly, his lips moist. “I am never letting you go.”  
“Good,” Will says so softly it’s hardly there at all, and when Hannibal straightens, he sees Will has his eyes closed and his palms up on the table. An expression of pure worship has crossed his features, caressing his always-tired face with tendrils of relief, and Hannibal feels as if he’s been touched by some grand work of art. _No,_ he thinks to himself. _This is what it feels like to have_ created _a grand work of art._

Will’s eyes open, and Hannibal thinks theirs is the creature which eclipses the very nature of love.

He leaves Will in the dining room, heading into his kitchen where he spends some time doing one of those two things he feels he does best. Will remains where he is, eventually picking the book back up, occasionally reaching back to scratch mindlessly between his shoulder blades. 

“Dinner is served,” he says as he returns to the dining room not much later, serving Will an extravagantly prepared plate. Stew, with red wine and carrots, decorated with deep purple flowers and perfectly bleached metacarpals. It’s a delicate dance of color, flavor, the scent seasoned to perfection. He’s placed the meat in the centre, all attention drawn to what it always so demanded. He’s truly outdone himself with the dish.  
Will looks at his plate, fingers his knife and fork and looks up at Hannibal. “What am I eating?”   
Hannibal smiles at him.


End file.
